


Full Circle

by neensz



Series: Epic X-over [1]
Category: Leverage, Psych, Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-06
Updated: 2010-07-06
Packaged: 2017-10-20 12:42:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 63,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/212881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neensz/pseuds/neensz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Leverage team works a job in Santa Barbara, but they're not the only con-men in town.  </p><p>Eliot's pretty damn happy with his life on the Leverage team.  He's not really a simple man, but he enjoys the simple things in life, like a nicely marbled steak, or a fine wine, or knocking in the teeth of some asshole with the self-satisfied glow of righteousness rather the numb distance of following suspect orders.  But that in no way makes up for having to play bodyguard to a fake psychic who's scamming a whole town.</p><p>Shawn's pretty sure he doesn't need a babysitter, since he's a grown-ass man, but he <i>does</i> keep getting tasered .  And kidnapped.  And concussed.  Running away from your problems definitely works better when all you have to avoid is the google-fu.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Full Circle

**Author's Note:**

> I reference things from the shows, but you could probably safely consider this a complete and total AU in regards to spoilers.
> 
> Story-arc-wise, it’s set in Season 4 or 5ish of Psych (with a Season 1 and 2 era Shawn), mid Season 3ish for Leverage, and post-canon for SG:A. 
> 
> Time-line-wise, it begins in August of 2012.

**1.**  
  
"Spencer!" Lassy shouted over the din of the bullpen. Shawn grinned. He bet his most favoritest Head Detective had just found the surprise that an 'anonymous admirer' had left on his desk earlier. Because who _didn't_ need a heat sensitive coffee mug with their very own face on it that portrayed steam billowing out of one's very own ears while one’s face turned bright red when filled with hot coffee (with three creams and four sugars)? _Honestly_.

  
Shawn bounced to his feet from his seat on one of the ridiculously uncomfortable benches in the waiting area, where he’d been talking seriously (and not gossiping at _all_ ) with Buzz while waiting for his cue, but Shawn almost tripped over his own feet when he saw one of the uniformed officers twitch at Lassy's shout and try to cover it. Scratch that. He saw one of the uniforms twitch and cover it _expertly_. He took a closer look at the guy (while appearing to pay no attention at all, a handy trick he _almost_ wanted to thank Henry for mercilessly drilling into him as a child) as he made his way over to Lassy's desk. He didn't recognize the officer. And, well, that didn't make any sense at all. Shawn knew all the cops here. This was his home base. And there'd been no gossip about new rookies on the force or transfers in from Buzz, and that man would be the first to know. So this was Curious, with a capital C, to say the least.  
  
The uniform looked real good on the mysteriously unknown officer though. _Real_ good. Shawn almost felt guilty for checking the guy out on his way over to bug Lassiter, but honestly, you couldn’t cheat on someone who refused to acknowledge 4 years of blatant come-ons, could you? Cheating's only when there's a relationship-thing. Or just a thing. Gus said he had a thing for Lassy-face. That didn't count as a thing, though, did it? He'd have to ask Gus later to make sure. And also to make him turn that funny purplish-mahogany color he turned whenever 'the gayness' came up. For such an avowed metrosexual, deets of any kind tended to turn Burton Guster McFusspant all the colors of the rainbow. Or make him scream and plug his ears and sing Diana Ross songs very loudly in an attempt to drown Shawn out. He'd seen it both ways.  
  
Shawn shook it off and bounded up to Lassy's desk, an irresistible smile, if he said so himself, plastered across his face, ready to snoop through the open files on Lassy's desk while the Head Detective distracted himself with his own rant.  Shawn’s gifts always served multiple purposes, some more work-related than others.

  
***

  
Eliot almost looked up when one of the detectives across the station roared his last name—his real last name. "Spencer!" He caught himself in time enough to keep from displaying a visible reaction, and instead shot a glance over at Hardison. The hacker raised his eyebrows in an implied shrug and went back to charming the female officer he was talking to. 

A kid jumped to his feet in response to the shout and dashed across the room.  The members of the force surrounding Eliot, however, were reacting oddly to the drama. In most stations he'd been in, a detective raging like this one was would mean cowering bystanders or answering anger from his colleagues, but here, everyone seemed to think it was funny, laughing and nudging each other like they were in on some joke. He took a closer look at the kid making his way across the station, and revised his first impression.  The bounciness and the clothes had thrown him at first glance. It wasn't some _kid_ , it was some _man_ , one not much younger than Eliot was, in fact. And if Eliot didn't know better, he'd think the guy was running a con, the way he stared at the files on the detective's desk when the whole room was focused on the raging detective. Maybe the guy was related to the detective, a younger brother or cousin or son or something, or maybe he was a junior detective being bawled out for dressing unprofessionally or being called out for an undercover op gone to shit. Maybe. Or not.  
  
He blinked, and suddenly a pair of over-bright eyes latched onto his, the only two gazes not locked on the raving detective. The kid’s—guy’s—eyes flicked up and down Eliot in a quick once-over before narrowing slightly. And then this 'Spencer' guy grinned at him. 

That grin was pretty damn knowing, in a way that made Eliot supremely uneasy. About this job, this city, that guy. He grabbed Hardison's attention and eased his way out of the crowd of onlookers without anyone the wiser, Hardison following almost as smoothly. They needed to reassess. And find out who the hell that guy was. He had balls, Eliot would give him that—it looked like he had the whole town under his thumb. Except maybe the yelling detective, but Eliot wouldn't put money on it, because the detective had been so distracted by his own yelling that the Spencer guy had rifled through the papers right in front of the detective without the detective—or anyone else—noticing. But even more importantly, if this Spencer guy had the run of the station it looked like he did, the guy could be a big problem. Or a big help. Eliot needed to know more about this guy before he could feel comfortable researching the mark from here anymore.

Damn small town old school cop shops like this one anyway. Everything was on paper. Hardison couldn't hack paper, not unless you were talking forgeries, and the man wasn't allowed to grift anymore since that damned Iceman fiasco. The air vents were small enough to offend Parker with their very existence, and she refused to step foot in the place because of them, if what Eliot had pieced together from her fragmented—and emphatic—explanation was correct. Nate smelled like the boozer he was and so therefore wasn’t very credible, and Sophie... Well, Sophie had an audition up in L.A. So it was up to Eliot to be the grifter for this con. And it was going so well already.

 

***

  
A week later, Shawn found himself once again in the vaguely familiar air ducts of the Hotel De La Cruz of Santa Barbara, where he'd once laughed himself through one of Lassy-face's briefings. That was what, four, five years ago now? He found it really hard to believe it had been that long. But the access point he'd found in the lobby bathrooms back then still worked as spectacularly as it had the first time, and he was making his way, if slowly, to the manager's office in order to snoop for something he could deduce psychically later. Hopefully, anyway. Right now he seemed to have gotten turned around and was spectacularly lost in the hotel's first floor air ducts. At least, Shawn was pretty sure he was still on the first floor.  
  
Shawn stopped once more to try and get his bearings—again—peering through a vent into the nondescript and blandly colored conference room below. It might be the one that Lassy-face had given his briefing in. It might be any of a number of other conference rooms, too. As he stared through the grate, he heard a couple of muted bangs that reverberated through the metal into his knees, and a muffled mutter. The muttering voice was cut off by another quiet voice. The conversation continued for about a minute or two, long enough to drive Shawn completely out of his mind with curiousity. He could _almost_ make out the words to the conversation, but not quite. 

Someone on the housekeeping staff must be dusting a little over-enthusiastically (knocking their duster repeatedly into the vents) as they chatted with someone next to a grating, or else there were other people in the air ducts with him. It had to be the first, because who would be in the air ducts?  (Other than a ridiculously good looking fake psychic—with great hair—looking for material for future visions, of course.)  
  
The voices stopped talking and the banging stopped as well, and Shawn figured that meant whoever was servicing the vents (he snickered and made a mental note to include that line the next time he was bragging to Gus about the fun-filled adventures he always had to have without Gus while Burton McGrumpy was at his 'real job') had finished and left, taking their conversation with them. Shawn shuffled forward down the duct (being careful over the grating since people in movies always ended up falling through them at inopportune moments) towards the next corner, wincing at the pressure on his bony joints; his elbows and knees were getting sore. The Rambo-crawl necessary for air duct-travel wasn't nearly as fun as it always looked in the movies, which was something he’d managed to misremember in the ridiculously short time since the last time he’d found himself in this position.  He really spent an inordinate amount of time on his elbows and knees for a fake psychic.  He was pretty sure other fake psychics didn’t end up in these situations as often as he seemed to.

***

  
Eliot grumbled to himself as he banged his shoulder on a corner, again. He wasn't built for crawling through air ducts, and didn't enjoy it nearly as much as Parker seemed to. She suddenly stopped crawling forward, freezing for a second before eeling around to face Eliot in a move that he could hardly comprehend, let alone imitate. "There's someone up there!" she hissed quietly, affronted. He could only guess that she was upset because someone was using 'her' air ducts. She'd gotten pretty possessive of them after that time she'd happened across that Apollo guy.  
  
Parker worked her way over and around him in a couple of seconds, leaving Eliot in front. "What the hell do you want me to do about it?" he hissed over his shoulder at her, grunting as her sharp elbows dug into a couple of tender places before she'd crawled off him and back onto the floor of the ducts again.  
  
"You're the hitter, do your thing," she whispered back from the direction of his feet.  
  
"I'm in a fucking air duct! There ain't room to swing a cat in here!" He growled over his shoulder.  
  
"Why do you want to swing a cat?  You don't even have one.  And it seems like it would be a really inefficient weapon."  
  
Eliot rolled his eyes and made a frustrated sound in his throat, reminding himself that this was Parker he was talking to. "Never mind. Where are they?"  
  
"Up three junctions, right, left," she directed him, creeping after him but staying a yard or two back. Eliot took special care to be quiet as he crawled, not wanting to let whoever was up there know which direction he was coming from or when he'd get to them.  
  
He tried to think of ways to take someone out in an air duct, and had managed come up with a couple of things to try, as long as the duct didn't give way and spill them out God fucking knows where in the building. Eliot maneuvered around a corner as quietly as he could and came face to face with that kid—man—guy—from the station. The guy who Nate had deemed trivial enough to not waste Hardison's skills on. 

The guy who was in the air duct right in front of him, staring back at Eliot with surprise plastered all over his face, though the expression was quickly supplanted with a charming grin. "Um, hey. Just checking on, you know, the filters and your pollen levels up..." the guy trailed off and narrowed his eyes at Eliot. "You're that cop from the station the other day! Did Lassy-face send you up here to...  But he doesn't know I'm...  You're not a real cop, are you?"

***

"You're not a real cop, are you," Shawn asked quietly, the question coming out more like a statement. A queasy feeling (this one unrelated to the questionable tacos from the truck outside the police station, unlike yesterday) roiled his stomach. Civilians don't pretend to be cops; they just don’t. Criminals—and psychic detectives, on occasion, when it’s really important—do. Civilians don't generally go climbing around in air ducts dressed in fancy black outfits (with black watch caps over some pretty amazing hair, he took an extra nanosecond or two to note) either. "Um. Please don't shoot me? I'm much too pretty to die."

***

"Shit," Eliot scowled at the guy. "I don't have time for this right now," he muttered to himself, and then added more loudly, "and I don't like guns. Shut up, or I'll let Parker tase you."  
  
Eliot heard an excited "Really?" from behind him, right before the guy said, a little too cockily, "Metal ducts, tasing's a bad idea."  
  
The wires flew past Eliot's right ear, and he flinched away from them belatedly as the studs caught the guy right in the left shoulder. The guy flopped and jerked for at least a minute, filling the ducts with the hollow bangs of his limbs smacking against the sides of the ducts, while Parker took her sweet time to let go of the trigger on the taser gun. Once she finally did, Eliot crawled forward to check the guy's pulse gingerly, and luckily it was still beating strongly.  Eliot craned around awkwardly to give Parker a _look_.  "He didn't shut up, you said I could!" she defended herself.  
  
"Yeah, and how'd you know we wouldn't get shocked too, considering we’re in a giant metal tube?" Eliot growled at her.  
  
She blinked at him. "I didn't."  
  
"Dammit Parker, now we've got to drag him back out with us," he muttered. He was actually kind of glad they didn't have comms in for this recon, because the situation was already bad enough as it was, without everyone yelling in his head to boot. Of course, none of this probably would have happened if Nate eased back up off the booze again, and got his head on straight enough to run this job the right way—with comms and an actual plan, rather than this fly by the seat of their pants shit. Eliot pulled the taser studs off the guy's shoulder and tossed them back at Parker, ignoring her yelp as he tangled the wires. It was long past time to get out of here.

***

Shawn groaned and blinked at the fuzzy faces surrounding him, trying to focus. "Man, I _told_ you that Czech dude had it out for me. _Now_ do you finally believe me?" he accused the chocolaty blob of Gus's face.  
  
"Czech dude?" An unfamiliar voice asked someone over his head.  
  
"Why were you in my ducts?" The Jules-blob questioned Shawn with way too much hostility.  
  
"I had nothing to do with your ducks, Jules!" Shawn protested, trying to remember if he had indeed done something with Jules' ducks. But that didn't make sense. Jules didn't have ducks. At least, he didn't think Jules had ducks. Can you have ducks in an apartment? Joey and Chandler did, but that was only late-night reruns, and not even from the '80s. "Jules, you don't have ducks. Not unless you've suddenly become Miss Chanandler Bong."  
  
The silence was fairly deafening after that remark. Gus didn't follow up, which was weird. Oh, god. He was horribly disfigured and they were trying to distract him. Did he still have all his limbs? Was his face all cut up and stitched and scarring? Or- "Oh my god! What's happened to my hair? Did they have to shave half my head for surgery? Was there a bleach accident? Did someone find a _bald spot_?" His hands flew up to clutch his hair, fingers working frantically across his scalp to discover for himself the horror that had them acting so unlike themselves. He blinked a few more times as his fingers tangled in his (still fabulous and reassuringly thick) hair, and the blobs finally resolved into faces. And not the ones he'd thought they’d be.

***

"I think you broke him, Parker," Hardison said slowly, breaking the awkward silence that’d filled the room since the guy flipped his lid about his hair.

 

 

 **2.**  

“First of all, you’re not Gus,” the guy accused Hardison with an affronted scowl.  Hardison scowled back and opened his mouth, but the guy talked right over him.  “Secondly, what the hell, dude?” he asked, turning to glare at Eliot.  “You _tased_ me?  _Really?_ ” 

Eliot smirked a little.  “Technically, Parker tased you.”  Parker raised her hand and gave the guy a little beauty-queen wave and a demure smile. 

 

*** 

 

Shawn untangled his hands from his hair and let them hang down at his sides, noting with slight relief that at least he wasn’t tied to the chair this time.  He’d totally had enough of that to last him a lifetime.  “Seriously though, please don’t shoot me.  I know for a fact that it hurts way more than people say it does, and I’m so not awesome with pain.”  The not-a-cop guy glowered at him and was probably about to protest that he didn’t like guns, again.  “Yeah, I know, you don’t like guns.  But that’s just one out of the rest of you, and I’m guessing my odds are pretty good for at least one of the rest of you liking guns.”  He didn’t give the rest of them a chance to defend themselves, but from the looks on their faces they didn’t like them either.  Except maybe the not-Gus dude, who looked like he might have liked to like guns but probably wasn’t very good with them.  Interesting.  “Okay, so, who are you and why did you kidnap me?  If you’re gonna send a ransom demand, it’d better go to Gus—Burton Guster—and not to my dad or Lassy.  Honestly, Lassy’d probably dance around with gawky glee and my da- Henry would expect me to get out of it myself and call it a learning experience.  And you should totally ask for Gus’s comic stash, because that would totally kill two birds with one stone—I’m getting really tired of listening to him and Jules go on and on and _on_ about them.  Though, then again, maybe you shouldn’t, because then Gus would never let me forget that he…”  

Shawn caught himself rambling and shut up. He glanced around the room, trying to pick up details that would help him out somehow, but unlike the sniper with the porn-star name who’d shot him, they didn’t have any photos up revealing useful details about themselves.  In fact, it didn’t look like they’d personalized the space at all.  It was just a bland hotel room with a couple of laptops reigning over the coffee table with an obscene number of cables running to the big-ass flatscreen TV lurking on one wall.  The curtains were closed, so he couldn’t see how high up he was, but he also saw  _Hotel de la Cruz Santa Barbara_ emblazoned in gold leaf on the room-service menu sitting on the corner of the coffee table near the laptops.  “You certainly didn’t take me far, did you?  Here I was hoping we’d gone to Mexico and could all get our hair braided together—you, in particular,” he pointed at the fake-cop dude, “would look awesome.  Seriously, you should think about it—but no, the spirits,” he put his fingers up to his temples and scrunched his face up to look psychic, “the spirits tell me that we’re still in the hotel.  Lame, man.  You never take me anywhere nice,” he whined. 

The fake cop blinked when Shawn said he wanted to braid the guy’s hair, and again when he pulled out the psychic act.  He made a slashing motion with his arm to silence the others when they started to react to something Shawn’d said, and leaned way into Shawn’s personal space.  “What’s your name?” he growled, right up in Shawn’s face. 

Shawn slumped back in his chair and fanned his face with a limp-wristed hand.  “Oh, the things you say to me!  You could get a girl all excited!” he exclaimed in his little girl voice.  

Shawn frowned on the inside when the only effect his little girl voice had on any of them was to make the blonde girl cock her head to the side and look at him quizzically.  The dude didn’t react at all, unless you count a person flicking their eyes up the ceiling like they were asking some higher power to give them an extra helping of patience as reacting (which Shawn had gotten enough from Gus over the years that it totally didn’t count as reacting anymore).  “Your name, man.”  

Shawn heaved a sigh and pouted at him.  “Henry told me to never talk to strangers.”  He thought a second.  “Actually, come to think of it, he never actually did tell me that.  That was Gus’s dad.”  He stared at the fake cop dude and mimed zipping his lips and throwing away the key.  The fake cop dude leaned closer and growled.  Like, really freaking _growled_ , like a bear or a wolf or something similar that only wanted to rip out his entrails for a nice midday snack.  Still mute, Shawn quickly mimed finding the imaginary key and unzipping his lips.  “But, of course, you know, we’ve known each other for whole days already, really, if you count the police station and our adventure in the air ducts and that time I was unconscious while you brought me here, so it’s like we’re best friends already, isn’t it?  I’m Shawn,” his voice broke embarrassingly as he rambled.  Shawn tried to see around the guy all up in his space and fasten his eyes on someone slightly less threatening, without measurable success.  “You know, it’s only polite to introduce yourselves back.  I could ask the spirits, but they’re a little unnerved by you, and I don’t like to frighten them unnecessarily, seeing as they’re already pretty spooky…” he trailed off uncertainly.  The guy was still up in his face. 

 

***

 

Eliot grunted and straightened up.  The guy—Shawn—smelled like pineapple.  Weird.  He mimicked Shawn’s psychic act back at him, channeling that Rand guy a little.  “The spirits are telling me your last name starts with an S…  Spielberg?  Spears?  Spencer, that‘s it, the spirits are telling me your last name is Spencer.”  He rolled his eyes again.  “Cut the act.  You can’t con a con.” 

Shawn narrowed his eyes at Eliot, and Eliot just barely heard the muttered “Bet I could.” 

Eliot ignored it, but made a mental note to not trust Shawn Spencer any farther than he could throw—any farther than _Shawn_ could throw _him_ , come to think of it.  The guy was pretty skinny—Eliot could probably get some good distance with him.  “I’m Eliot, that’s Parker and Hardison.  Nate and …Sophie aren’t here yet.”  The hesitation before Sophie’s name was second nature by now.  They’d all started doing it to tease Nate, since he hadn’t earned Sophie’s real name yet, and it had become annoyingly ingrained.  “So what were you doing in Parker’s ducts?  You running a long game on the cops, here?  That’s seriously some kind of stupid, man.” 

Shawn seemed to get offended.  “I’m _not_ running a…  Well, okay, kinda.  But you should have seen their close rate before I started helping!  It was ridiculous.  With my help, they’re at a _hundred_ percent—well, okay, it’s like ninety seven point three percent maybe, but still!  I’m _helping_.”  Shawn folded his arms over his chest and glared at the three of them.  “Your turn.  What are _you_ doing here in my city?  From the whole ‘ _you can’t con a con_ ,’” and Eliot figured that stupid sounding Christian Bale’s Batman-esque drawl was supposed to have been an imitation of his voice, “I’m guessing you’re here to run a scam or something on someone here.  That’s not cool, man.  I’ll have to sic Lassy and Jules on you.”  

Eliot grinned and folded his own arms across his chest, knowing it pulled his shirt tight across the muscles in his shoulders and arms.  Subtle intimidation it wasn't, but it worked.  Shawn squeaked.  Eliot grinned wider.  “You’re assuming we’re gonna let you go.  Why would we do that?” 

Hardison snorted, interrupting Eliot’s fun.  “Give over, man.  Here, Shawn, you work with the cops, right?  Look at this.”  Hardison sat in front of one of the laptops and tapped a few keys and the presentation Eliot had seen once already started up on the flatscreen TV with Hardison narrating it for Shawn.  “Coyotes are people that help people—illegal immigrants—across the United States-Mexico border.  Some of ‘em are all right, but this guy,” Hardison pulled up a photo of their mark, “isn’t.  He works the Arizona-Mexico border.  For every five people he brings across the border, two disappear without a trace.  No one can report him for anything, because it’s all way illegal and they’d just get deported after spending thousands to get here in the first place.  People crossing with him started disappearing in the early '90s, though not nearly as many as are disappearing today.  The sister of one of the missing girls hired us to find out what happened to her.  We don’t know what he’s doing with the people he kidnaps, because we haven’t found any of them yet, but we’re pretty sure he’s selling them by the activity in his bank accounts whenever someone disappears.  Whether it’s prostitution, slavery, body parts, murder for hire, we don’t know.  All we know so far is that he’s _probably_ selling him to this guy,” Hardison threw up another photo on the flat screen.  “This guy, he’s why we’re here in Santa Barbara.  His name’s-” 

“Esteban Cruz,” Shawn interrupted Hardison, a blank look on his face and two fingers resting on his temple.  It just looked like a habitual reflex that time, so Eliot didn’t comment on it.  “He owns the Hotel de la Cruz.  I’m a private psychic detective as well as a consultant for the SBPD—Cruz hired me to find out if his manager was skimming.  That’s why I was in the ventilation shafts.  I was going for the manager’s office to look for evidence, since Lassy won’t move without it, and Jules won’t move without Lassy.”  Shawn slowly lowered his fingers from his temple, and looked like he was about to be sick.  “Seriously?  He wasn’t creepy at all.  He seemed nice.  His daughter’s at Harvard, and his wife is one of those charity-volunteer people.  He even showed me pictures of them.” 

Nate had come into the room at some point during Hardison’s presentation, and broke the short silence following Shawn’s little speech.  “Yes, but the rich and powerful take what they want, and they don’t care who they hurt.  We steal it back from them.”  

Eliot saw Shawn cover the look of sick hurt on his face with a mask of childish glee.  “No way!  You’re Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men!  I bet you’re Robin,” he pointed at Nate, “and the rest of them are your merry _merry_ men, aren’t they?  You’re totally Little John,” he told Eliot, who narrowed his eyes at him, and Shawn quickly moved on to accuse Hardison and Parker, “and you’re Will Scarlet, and you’re Cecil, and I’m betting Sophie is his Maid Marion, isn’t she?” he asked Eliot, who smirked at the dumb-struck look on Nate’s face.  “So you rob from the rich and give to the poor, huh?  You con cons,” he added with a look at Eliot.  

Eliot shrugged.  “It’s what we do.”

 

***

 

Shawn raised his eyebrows at Eliot, really wishing right then that he knew how to raise only one.  “It’s _what you do_?  Really?  Tell me, Little John, what is it that _you_ do?  I’m guessing Robin Hood there is the boss, and Will Scarlet over there’s got his computers.  What do Little John and Cecil do, other than taser lost innocent bystanders?”  Shawn noticed the boss-man Nate person level a _look_ at Parker in his peripheral vision, but didn’t stop staring at Eliot.  Will—Hardison—was tappy-tapping on his laptop, and Shawn was distracted from his inquiry when that photo of Shawn from Zippy’s exhibit at the museum flashed across the flat screen.  

Hardison made a questioning noise at the computer and Shawn gave up trying to get answers out of Eliot and turned to look over at Hardison.  “Over sixty jobs since high school?  Really, man?”  

Shawn frowned at the number.  It sounded a little high.  “Over sixty?  It was only fifty-seven, last time I checked.  Fifty-eight counting Psych.” 

Hardison shrugged.  “I got more, dude.  Maybe you miscounted or something.  Do you really live in a dry cleaners?  That’s weird.” 

“Well, it is when you say it like that!  I got a good rate, shut up.  And I can ride the clothes carousel whenever I want to, so there.”  Shawn frowned.  Hardison was being Not Cool, disparaging his apartment like that and making Shawn defend himself.  “Be nice, or I’ll make you Friar Tuck instead of Will Scarlet.” 

Eliot stopped the bickering before it could get very far.  Shawn was actually kind of grateful.  Arguing with Hardison was nowhere near as fun as it was with Gus.  Hardison was a failure as Substitute Gus.  “Moving on—Shawn, you said you were working for Esteban Cruz.  Do you think you could get us in his house?  That’s the one place we haven’t been able to check out yet.” 

“What exactly do you mean by ‘get us in his house?’  How many of you are we talking, and will you agree to be shipped in via crates by UPS _a la_ Brendan Fraser in _George of the Jungle_?  Do I have to supply the high tops?”  Shawn was on a roll, but the Nate boss person cut him off. 

“Parker, and probably Eliot, just to be safe.  Cruz isn’t hosting any events or parties at his house in the near future, and all his employees have worked for him for years and he’s personally acquainted with them all, so we can’t get in that way.  Could you take them with you when you went to tell him about his manager?  Pass them off as your assistants, maybe?” 

“Why those two?  And what kind of psychic needs assistants?” Shawn protested. 

Eliot snorted.  “A fake one.”  Shawn glanced at him for a second.  

“Exactly.  And I’m a- he thinks I’m a real one.”  Shawn corrected himself.  

Nate hummed to himself.  “I’ll work on it.  We’ll get them in somehow, but you’re right, you probably won’t be able to help.”  Shawn frowned to himself. 

“Yeah, okay.  As fun as this all is, I’ve got a mani-pedi appointment in about, oh, fifteen minutes,” Shawn interrupted Nate, glancing at his empty wrist.  “So am I gonna have to call Janice and cancel, or can I go?  Cuticles like these don’t take care of themselves, you know,” he waved a demonstrative hand in the general direction of the Nate boss.  “Weekly maintenance is a must.”  Nate blinked at Shawn, then looked over at Eliot.

 

***

 

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” Eliot growled at Nate, inferring from the look that he had babysitting duty.  He snagged an earbud from Hardison’s stash, muttering fiercely to the hacker, “If I have to listen to it, so do the rest of y’all.” 

He shepherded Shawn out of the hotel room and down the three flights of stairs to the lobby, not wanting to be trapped in the elevator with the guy and his incessant chatter.  What if the elevator got stuck between floors?  He’d have to listen to that for _hours_.  

“So, Mr. Eliot Spencer, what is it that you _do_?  You still haven’t answered the question.”  Shawn asked, pausing on the steps and turning to look at Eliot a few stairs above him. 

Eliot frowned at him.  “How do you know my last name?” 

“The same way you knew mine,” Shawn grinned disarmingly and tapped his temple with a forefinger, “I’m psychic.” 

Eliot opened his mouth to argue, but instead let out an, “Oh,” as things clicked.  “The police station.  You saw that?” 

Shawn shrugged.  “I see everything.  It’s _what I do_.  What do _you_ do?” 

Eliot grinned at Shawn, showing his teeth, and Shawn backed down a stair.  “I hit people who annoy me.  _That’s_ what I do.” 

Shawn shut up.  God bless silence.

 

 

 

 **3.**  

Shawn kept silent the rest of the way to Janice’s shop, who thought he was adorable and would probably accommodate him even though their standing appointment was two days from today.  He probably could have ditched Eliot—probably—and went his own way, because the dude was way too into the whole ‘oozing threat in Shawn’s direction’ thing, but idea of manly-man Eliot trapped in the midst of a beauty salon filled Shawn with sadistic glee.  He’d ditch him after, probably.  And what was the point of ditching the dude when they were working on the same case, anyway, Shawn rationalized to himself.  Never mind the fact that the Justice League of merry men back in the hotel could probably find him in minutes flat if he did ditch the threat-meister. 

Shawn had been quiet for too long, and it was starting to wear on him.  Gus had never made him be quiet this long, and while Henry had attempted in the past, his father had never succeeded.  It probably had something with the ‘I could squash your head between my hands like it’s the watermelon to my Gallagher,’ looks that Eliot kept giving him.  Honestly, what in the world could the dude still be irritated about?  He stared at Eliot surreptitiously as they walked, trying to figure out what he could do that would make his being squashed like a bug less likely. 

 

***

 

Eliot could feel Shawn’s eyes on him, and the sensation of being stared at was beginning to irritate him more than the guy’s talking had.  “What the hell are you staring at?” Eliot finally exploded, after roughly the fifth time he’d glanced over at Shawn and Shawn had jerked his eyes away.  

“Nothing,” Shawn muttered sullenly, then immediately brightened.  “Are we done playing the silent game?  Because that’s so ‘yuppie parents on a road trip with three kids,’ and we’re not even in a car.  Also, I totally won.” 

Eliot sighed in defeat as Shawn chattered on, tuning him out to the best of his ability.  The hotel was downtown, so they probably didn’t have much farther to walk.  Eliot didn’t expect much silence at the salon, but at least there would be shiny things to attract Shawn’s attention.  And, more importantly, other people for Shawn to chatter at.  He growled to himself and said, knowing his earbud would pick it up, “Please tell me one of the rest of y’all is gonna take over babysitting duty soon.  I’m gonna kill him.  And unless Nate has decided we don’t actually need the guy for his grand plan, that’s not gonna go over well.” 

Hardison’s unsympathetic and slightly malicious chuckle was his only answer.  It didn’t look like anyone was volunteering, but maybe they’d help him hide the body later.  

Shawn stopped talking and cocked his head at Eliot.  “You know you look like a crazy person when you’re talking to yourself, right?”

 

***

 

Shawn almost stuttered when the full force of Eliot’s glare turned on him, but managed not to embarrass himself.  “I mean, the least you could do is wear a Bluetooth thingy or something so people think you’re on the phone, but even _I_ can’t see your earbud and you sound crazy, like, nuthouse crazy.  And mean, by the way.  I totally don’t need a babysitter.”  _Who_ wouldn’t _have naps and snacks all day if they could, honestly?_ he griped to himself, Jules’ comment still rankling even though it’d been months since she’d explained her logic to him. 

Eliot just narrowed his eyes at Shawn and motioned for him to keep walking.  Shawn complied with a frown.  Having a babysitter was only cool it was some sweet young thing, preferably seducible, and he was the lecherous single father.  Though come to think of it, that wasn’t cool either.  Just creepy, and the basic plot of really a lot of porn.  He made a mental note that perhaps he’d been watching a few too many of those lately and that maybe it was time to just let his thing for Lassy die a natural death rather than fantasizing about it every waking minute.  That kind of thing led to some pretty uncomfortable situations, especially if his every step was going to be shadowed by a hit-man cum babysitter.  He also _really_ needed to not think that word right now, even if it _was_ grammatically correct.  Damn it.  Well, at least they were finally here.

 

***

 

Eliot glanced around the salon as they pushed through the glass doors.  It seemed like the person who’d decorated it had tried to use irony as a theme—with limited success.  The walls were painted a garish pink, and the mirror frames and furniture were all glossy black, reflecting hints of the pink from every curve and angle of their forms.  The unframed posters tacked on the walls featured some impressively ugly women that were possibly drag queens.  Eliot couldn’t really tell, and definitely did not intend on asking.  Not to mention the fact that everyone in the salon was, with one exception, entirely male, as far as Eliot could tell.  Again, he had no intention of trying to confirm his guess.  He glared after Shawn as the guy made his escape to the bathroom, leaving him hanging in the foyer.  No way was he going to follow Shawn into the bathroom here, of all places.  No need to borrow trouble. 

He aimed himself at the receptionist, the one person he was seventy percent sure was a woman, and set himself the task of finding out if Shawn actually had an appointment, or if the guy had dodged him by slipping out a window in the bathroom.  He really didn’t want to follow Shawn into the bathroom, but he was starting to suspect that the appointment had been a lie.  Not in the least because, barring the woman(ish person) at the desk, he couldn’t see anyone remotely resembling a Janice in the salon. 

He tried not to show the relief that filled him when Shawn exited the bathroom and headed for one of the men.  Sure, he’d been in worse places, like Djakarta or Tajikistan, but none of them had made him quite as uncomfortable. 

 

***

 

Shawn darted into the salon, tossed a wave at Janice, and beelined for the bathroom to take care of a thing or two and wash his hands.  Going to the manicurist with dirty hands was like going to the stylist with oily hair.  Sure, they were going to wash it for you anyway, but it was just polite to give them a clean canvas to work with.  Luckily, Eliot didn’t seem to feel the need to follow him into the bathroom.  When Shawn sauntered back out the door, Eliot was chatting up the one girl in the entire place.  Shawn rolled his eyes and twinkled his fingers at Eliot to get his attention, and motioned him over with a jot of malicious glee.  Luckily Janice was free—no one was sitting at his station.  “Janice!” Shawn caroled, receiving the manicurist’s instant attention and a quick air-kiss.  “I hope you’re not busy, but today was hell on my hands and I need your expertise!”  Janice immediately started buzzing around, making him sit _here_ and put his hands _there_ and feel free to tell him _all_ about it and oh, _my_ , what _had_ he done to his hands today?!   Shawn decided that not telling him that he’d spent the better part of the morning crawling around in ventilation shafts was the wiser course of action. 

Eliot finally came over to stand next to Shawn.  He stood like he was on sentry duty, with his arms crossed and a slight scowl on his face that seemed to be just for Shawn.  There was a break in Janice’s monologue and Eliot leaned down to mutter into Shawn’s ear, “I seriously doubt this guy’s name is Janice.  And the receptionist’s calendar says your appointments are on Saturdays.  Today is Thursday.” 

“So it is.  So glad you know the days of the week, dear,” Shawn fluttered his eyelashes at Eliot and freed a hand from Janice’s lotiony ministrations to pat Eliot’s cheek damply.  Amazingly, it came back of its own accord and with no broken fingers.  However, Eliot had turned into a frozen volcano of rage.  Shawn decided not to touch him again for a while.  Eliot smiled woodenly at Janice while Shawn introduced them.  “Janice, this is my lover, Jon Torsgaard.  He’s just back from a business trip to Norway, I haven’t seen him in so long!  So of course I’m making him come everywhere with me today, so I can get in some Jon-time,” Shawn began, winking at the manicurist to make the double-entendre of his statement more like a single-entendre.  “Jon, dear, this is Janice, though everyone but me has to call him Johannes, on pain of death and mangled fingers,” Shawn simpered at Eliot.

 

***

 

Eliot immediately let a sappy smile fall into place as he glanced down at Shawn, even though in truth he felt the urge to throttle the guy.  He forced himself to gentle a hand over Shawn’s shock of brown hair, making the gel crunch, and rested it at the base of Shawn’s neck, where he tightened his fingers warningly.  Johannes was asking where in Norway he’d been on business, and what he did for a living.  Eliot tightened his grip on Shawn’s neck when the guy started to answer for him, and spoke for himself, letting a barely perceptible hint of a Norwegian accent complicate his southern drawl.  “I spent most of my time in Oslo and Bergen at my company’s paper factories, though I made a couple of day trips down to Kristiansand and Stavanger to visit family when I could.”  

Shawn was looking up at him in blank-faced confusion.  Eliot winked at him, and Shawn flushed and faced Johannes again, waving a hand to attract his attention.  “Janice, darling, don’t poach,” Shawn reproved and the manicurist stopped ogling Eliot with a laugh and went back to work on Shawn’s hands. 

Eliot smirked to himself at the momentary shock on Shawn’s face.  Totally worth opening himself up to the constant heckling from his earpiece.  Well, maybe.  Hardison seemed to be choking on something at the other end of the line, so he was spared for now, at least.  Somehow Eliot always seemed to surprise people—including the people who really should know better by now—when he showed a talent for conning marks.

 

***

 

Shawn kept glancing at Eliot from behind the cover of his lashes as Janice finished with his cuticles and absentmindedly confirmed his pedicure appointment for the usual time on Saturday.  For some reason he didn’t really want to take off any of his clothes in front of Eliot, not even his shoes.  The dude was confusing him.  He interrupted Janice’s flirtatious goodbye to Eliot, uncharacteristically brusque as he reminded Janice—again—that he was poaching.  He grabbed Eliot’s arm and towed him out of the salon, unnerved by Eliot’s flirting across gender barriers.  The point of this escapade had been to make _Eliot_ uncomfortable, not _Shawn_.  Something was backwards here.

 

***

 

Eliot shrugged out of Shawn’s grip as soon as they were through the doors of the salon and growled at him.  “Next time you give me a part, give me some warning, will you?”  Shawn just blinked at him and shook his head sharply, though it didn’t seem to be in response to Eliot.  He turned and headed down the sidewalk without looking to see if Eliot was following. 

“What?” Eliot growled at him, regretting the urge to end the brief silence.  But he really needed an explanation for why Shawn was behaving so out of character.  Though for all he knew, this could be normal behavior for the guy.

 

***

 

Shawn stopped and spun around to face him.  “You, your…”  Shawn changed his mind about what he was going to say almost as soon as he opened his mouth.  He caught a glimpse of something glinting through Eliot’s (fabulous) hair, and fixed on that like it was a lifeboat and he was drowning in a frigid ocean with Leo DiCaprio.  “You totally went to Mexico without me and got your hair braided!”  Shawn commented, forcing his voice into something that roughly approximated offended.  Or a fifteen-year-old girl. 

Eliot seemed self-conscious as he tucked back the two beaded braids previously hidden by the rest of his hair.  “Wasn’t in Mexico and I didn’t know you.  So shut up about it.  Where are we going, exactly?” 

“The Psych office,” Shawn answered him briefly before latching onto the self-consciousness like a barnacle onto Henry’s fishing boat.  “Where was it, then?” he prodded.  “Did you have a sleepover with the girls and you all braided each other’s hair?  Was it some secret assassin’s guild ritual that you’re not allowed to tell outsiders on pain of death?  Did you fall asleep in front of Parker?  Is it a Gordian knot that only your true prince can rescue you from?  I know!  It’s a secret sign that you’re playing host to an evil parasite!  Because glowing eyes are so passé.” 

Eliot glowered at him and didn’t respond.  Shawn didn’t let it deter him, and continued heckling Eliot until he was corralled into a sunlit alley a few blocks from the Psych office and thrown up against the wall.  It was oddly reminiscent of Lassy’s old behavior, except the whole arm across his throat thing—that was new and uniquely Eliot.  “Enough,” Eliot growled into Shawn’s face, and Shawn suppressed a shiver.  

Unfortunately for Shawn’s composure, it wasn’t a shiver of fear.  Unbalanced by the storm of hormones coursing through his body, he simply nodded meekly, just wanting Eliot to back off and get out of his space before Shawn did something he was pretty sure he’d regret, like sigh or pass out or try to kiss him or freaking come in his pants.  At least Eliot hadn’t followed up with the full body press that Lassy had occasionally tried to intimidate Shawn with.  Really, was it any wonder Shawn had had such a giant crush on the awkward detective?  

Had had?  Shit.  Shawn’s subconscious had better not have transferred that crush to Eliot, or Shawn was going to have a serious talk with it.  Crushing on an international assassin (which was something he was pretty sure was _somewhere_ on Eliot’s résumé) was not a recipe for a long and fulfilling life, as evidenced by his current lightheadedness.  Eliot had his forearm across Shawn’s throat and was putting pressure on Shawn’s carotid artery.  Jugular artery?  One of the two.  Gus would know.  But that traitor was on another of his work retreats for his ‘real job.’  Didn’t Gus know that leaving Shawn all by himself was a recipe for trouble?  Just look at what had happened in the past two days!  It was all Gus’s fault.  

Everything was going grayscale.  The colors were started bleeding out of everything, and it was beginning to feel like he was looking though a long tunnel, or like he was wearing a baseball cap with a really long and curled brim like that grown up kid in _Sandlot_.  He tried blinking rapidly to make the pretty colors come back.  Eliot seemed to take that, or maybe the color Shawn assumed his face was turning, as a sign and backed off.  Why he hadn’t backed off when Shawn had nodded agreement was something Shawn felt his life would be complete without ever knowing, especially if it was because Eliot really was going to kill him until someone on the other end of the fancy little ear thingy said something to stop him.  Because that’s really something you don’t want to know about someone you’re going to be spending a lot of time with.

 

***

 

If he wasn’t careful, he was going to catch himself feeling guilty for shutting the guy up.

 

 

 

 

 **4.**  

Something had been tapping at the back of Eliot’s brain for the past few hours.  Amazingly, it wasn’t the urge to kill the man currently deeply engaged with, from the sound of it, a flash version of Asteroids on his computer.  Earlier in the hotel, Shawn had said _Please don’t shoot me.  I know for a fact that it hurts way worse than people say it does, and I’m so not awesome with pain._   Someone had shot him.  Eliot took that to mean that someone had probably been aiming for him.  God knew he’d wanted to a couple of times already, and he’d only known the guy for less than a day.  

So not only was Eliot stuck babysitting the guy for some unexplained reason of Nate’s, but he had to be on the lookout for people with grudges and guns, too?  He didn’t even like the guy, and he wasn’t even getting paid for this shit. 

 

***

 

“Who shot you?”  It was completely out of the blue, and Shawn’s hands jerked on the keyboard.  His triangle died in a fiery 8-bit explosion with accompanying midi orchestration. 

“The porn star,” Shawn replied without thinking.  It was what he called him in his head—which probably said something really messed up about his relationship with porn.  He shoved that thought to the back of his head and cursed the fact that his mom was a psychologist.  Constantly psychoanalyzing yourself wasn’t good jujubees, but it was really hard not to do it if you’d flipped through all of your psychologist mom’s textbooks one day after school because you were bored and you couldn’t forget a _single sentence_ of what you’d read, even 16 years later.  At least he was no longer convinced he was a sociopath anymore.  That—that had eventually led to the Mexican border with Gus.  Twice. 

Dude-man didn’t have a reply for that.  Shawn went back to his triangle with a purely internal sigh of relief.  If he didn’t talk about it, he could ignore the memory for the rest of his life and pretend to have forgotten it so well that occasionally he almost did forget it.  Luckily, he was only a consultant, and not required to go through the trauma of mandatory psychological evaluations like Lassi and Jules had to.  He could talk circles around any psychologist not his mother anyway, sometimes even making them question themselves and their own self-worth if they were persistent and pushed past his deflections.  But doing that always made him feel slightly dirty, so it was best for everyone involved for Shawn to just avoid the head-shrinkers in the first place. 

The office phone rang, and Shawn grabbed for it gratefully.  He needed a distraction.  But he’d replaced the phone upside down in its cradle last time—again—and it died as soon as he answered it.  But at least he’d seen the caller ID in the second before the little screen went dead, so he started patting himself down in an effort to find his iPhone to call Gus back with.  Though why Gus hadn’t called him on it in the first place…  He had a moment of complete blankness, then remembered stashing it in Gus’s center console on Sunday when they were on their way to get jerked chicken because he’d already broken the first incarnation by sitting on it.  Which meant it was still in Gus’s car.  With Gus.  In Arizona.  Shit.

 

***

 

He watched the guy do the familiar ‘where’s my phone’ pocket pat-down dance before looking briefly irritated and turning to face Eliot.  “Can I borrow your phone?” 

“No,” Eliot replied shortly, and Shawn huffed out an exasperated breath. 

“If I don’t call him back he’ll call Henry and then Henry will track me down and want to know who you are and ask you questions…”  Eliot stopped listening to Shawn ramble as Hardison spoke in his ear.  

“We found her.  Oh, God, we found the client’s sister.”  Hardison’s voice was grim, though Eliot couldn’t understand why. 

“Great.  She can testify or provide evidence or whatever the cops need to go after this asshole, and I can ditch this guy since we don’t need him anymore.  Should I meet y’all back at the hotel?  Where’s the sister, anyway?”  Eliot wasn’t often thrilled, but he was feeling pretty close at the prospect of not having to be around Shawn any longer. 

“She’s in the SBPD morgue.”

 

***

 

Shawn was a little offended by Eliot’s mention of ditching him, but didn’t comment, because he was trying to figure out the other side of the conversation from Eliot’s half and didn’t want to miss anything.  They’d found the sister of their client, that much was easy to deduce.  But the look on Eliot’s face after he stopped talking indicated that all was not well in Sherwood Forest—or the _Hotel de la Cruz_ HQ—whichever.  “Where’s the sister?” he asked, trying not to sound hesitant.  He really didn’t want to be ditched right when things were getting interesting, and Shawn figured maybe being a teensy bit reticent might help until Eliot remembered how indispensable he was.  Or found it out in the first place. 

Eliot groaned and scrunched up his face for a moment, almost like he’d forgotten Shawn was standing next to him.  But that would just be silly.  Shawn knew he was unforgettable.  “In the morgue.  Coroner hasn’t written up his report or emailed it to anyone yet though so we don’t know how or why.” 

Finally, a proper distraction.  “Awesome!”  Eliot glared at him, and Shawn decided elaborating might be a good thing, because Eliot was getting the hitting look again.  “I mean, I can get you in there, no problem.  Woody and I are like this,” he demonstrated a fist bump.  With himself, because Eliot left him hanging.  

“What the hell is a Woody?”  Eliot asked, sounding pretty exasperated with Shawn.  Then he grimaced, in apparent belated realization of how that had come out, and like he wasn’t expecting Shawn’s answer to be helpful at all. 

Shawn refrained.  When it was too easy, like that, it just took all the fun out of it.  “Woody’s the SBPD’s coroner, man.  He’s awesome.  He always tells me stuff, even when he’s not supposed to.”  Shawn tossed the dead handset in the general direction of the charger and made for the door.  He paused for a moment to catch Eliot’s eye right before he exited the door, and warned him seriously, “Just…  Don’t eat anything he offers you.”

 

***

 

Eliot still wasn’t sure how he’d lost the transportation argument.  Well, he’d won part of it—there was no way in hell he was ever gonna be in the bitch seat on a bike.  But Shawn had managed to talk him out of Eliot driving Shawn’s Norton, and out of a cab as well.  He still hadn’t figured out how.  As soon as Shawn mentioned hitting up Henry for the truck, Eliot ended the discussion by shoving the bike helmet on Shawn’s head.  None too gently, either.  

He straddled the Norton and waited for Shawn to get on behind him, ignoring the protests and complaining about how they’d already crossed this option off the list.  He blinked down at the brain-bucket Shawn shoved at him before getting on the bike.  “Oh, _hell_ no.  Not happening,” Eliot told him with a smirk, handing the helmet back over his shoulder to Shawn for him to dispose of.  He didn’t even want to know why the backup helmet was neon green with PSYCH in giant silver glitter letters across the front.  He ignored Shawn’s bitching and moaning about the dangers of motorcycles without helmets, and kick started the bike.  The growl of the engine drowned out Shawn’s voice and Eliot grinned into the wind as he pulled out into the street.  

The SBPD morgue didn’t look much like any other morgue Eliot had ever been in, and believe it or not, he’d been in a few.  For one, the _Dawn of the Dead_ movie poster (Romero, not remake) on the office door was… unique.  As was the fact that the coroner was holding a burger oozing ketchup with one gloved hand while his other red-stained glove was occupied weighing internal organs on a digital scale.  At least, Eliot hoped to God the red oozing out of the burger and covering the gloves was ketchup.  As it was, he took a moment to swallow and concentrate on settling his stomach.  He’d thought Shawn was being facetious and gutter-minded when he’d told Eliot not to eat anything Woody gave him.  Not so much.  He glanced over at the guy and saw the same disturbed look on Shawn’s face he felt on his own.

 

***

 

Woody put down his burger to offer Shawn a ‘hello’ fist bump, but Shawn politely declined.  And tried not to throw up in his mouth.  At least Gus wasn’t here for this, because if Gus was here he’d be throwing up, and Shawn was a sympathetic puker.  “Hey, Woodster, I like the poster.  Nice touch.  New, isn’t it?”  Woody grinned at the compliment, and Shawn was in.  “I followed a spirit to this place, a very distressed spirit.  She’s really upset.  But unfortunately she’s speaking Spanish, so pretty much the only thing I’m getting from her is that she’s upset.  I brought my translator, John Smith,” he waved in Eliot’s direction, “to see if we can’t get to the bottom of what she’s telling us.  But all I know so far is that she’s here,” he indicated the morgue with a flail of his arm that had Eliot jumping out of the way, “so you think you can help me out, buddy?  Met any Spanish-speaking dead people wandering around without their bodies lately?” 

Woody paused to think.  Like, actually took time to think about the question.  Which was a little weird, but Shawn had seen way weirder from the coroner.  In the past five minutes, even.  “Not lately, no,” Woody finally replied. 

Shawn made a face and cracked, “Playing hide and seek with invisible people isn’t for the easily bored.  John’s been keeping me on track though.  How about meeting any dead Spanish-speaking people whose spirits might be playing hide and seek with easily bored psychics?  I bet I could talk to her—or listen at her while John here translates for me—if I found her home base and she’s olly-olly-oxen-free,” Shawn grinned at Woody.

 

***

 

Eliot still wasn’t sure how he was supposed to be translating for a ‘psychic’ talking to a ‘spirit,’ but he kept his mouth shut and his head down (figuratively) while Shawn flapped his trap.  The police coroner (Woody couldn’t really be his name, could it?  That was just taking bad puns to a whole new level.) didn’t even seem to wonder how a translator could work with spirits.  Santa Barbara got weirder and more fucked up every hour Eliot spent in it.  

Somehow Shawn talked Woody into showing them Maria Chavez’s body, and while Eliot stared intently at it, mentally cataloguing injuries and paying close attention to what the coroner was saying about what he’d discovered so far—no cause of death as of yet, because she was still waiting to be autopsied—Shawn was grabbing at Eliot’s shoulder with one hand and holding the other over Maria’s waxy face, and appeared to be seizing.  Eliot didn’t pay much attention to what Shawn was doing until he started babbling in broken Spanish.  Really broken, nonsensical Spanish.  Eliot rolled his eyes, not even caring if the coroner saw.  Suddenly, though, Shawn’s Spanish started making sense and forming proper sentences, though it wouldn’t to someone who only knew Spanish, considering almost all the connecting words were in some language not Spanish.  Eliot gave half his attention to remembering what Shawn said in case he had to ‘translate’ it later, and let the other half be filled with amazement.  A relentlessly annoying little lazy fuckup idiot like Shawn had actually learned a second language, maybe even a third, well enough to be reasonably fluent.  That didn’t fit the impression of the guy Eliot had formed.  The question filling half of Eliot’s brain was this: Was Shawn a relentlessly annoying little lazy fuckup idiot with a gift for languages, or was there actually more to Shawn than met the ey… senses? 

The other half of Eliot’s attention, the part listening to Shawn prattle on in a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese (if Eliot wasn’t mistaken, and he knew his foreign languages, so he wasn’t) recalled the other half of his mind from its wandering.  Eliot stiffened and tried not to look as if he was concentrating every iota of his attention on Shawn.  He’d said _Damian Moreau_. 

 

***

 

“ _O homem do hotel, o dono do hotel grande, o Sr. Cruz, ele disse que eu estava destinado para o homem grande chefe que vinha visitar. Eu não quero ser usado por Damian Moreau. Lutei contra eles e tentou fugir. Eu morri,_ ” Shawn babbled, not paying much attention to what he was saying.  He figured that an SBPD employee like Woody, like himself for that matter, or most anyone who lived in SoCal, would know at least some Spanish, so he switched it up and threw in some Portuguese he’d learned while in Brazil visiting Jack—before he’d realized what an asshole his uncle was—so he wouldn’t have to pay attention to exactly what he was saying.  If Eliot didn’t know Portuguese, and Shawn was pretty much planning on him not knowing it, he’d make up something about how the essence of her meaning had come through because he was connected to a translation conduit circuit, or something like that.  All he really needed was enough to point the cops at Esteban Cruz somehow, for something, but he was drawing a blank with the body.  There were no conveniently located shoe clues, most likely because she was naked under the sheet, and nothing monogrammed with the hotel’s logo had been pressed against her skin—at least the skin that was visible and there was no way he was lifting that sheet—while she died, in order to leave fancily lettered bruises.  Pretty much, Shawn was at zilch.  Hopefully Eliot was getting more out of the body than he was.

 

***

 

“Did you get that?” Eliot subvocalized for his earbud under the cover of Shawn’s continuing prattle, knowing that Hardison would be able to pick it out. 

“Damian Moreau?  Hell yeah.  Nate’s jumping around like he got stung by a bee and is deathly allergic and Parker used his last EpiPen for a lock pick.  He says to bring him here as soon as you can.  He wants to talk to him.” 

“I’m on it.”  Yeah.  Eliot wanted to _talk_ to Shawn too.  Nate’s method probably wouldn’t involve systematic beating till the guy spilled everything he knew about everything, though, worse luck.  He would have liked to know what made the guy tick.  And it didn’t escape Eliot’s attention that the fact that someone he’d never met was hanging his life on a thread over this Moreau thing was possibly making him slightly prone to violent solutions.  More prone, anyway. 

Parker was right.  Being on the wrong side of blackmail sucked.  Hard and wide. 

 

 

 

 

**5.**

 

Henry found them as Eliot was hustling Shawn out of the morgue.  It wasn’t exactly superb detective work on his father’s part, considering he literally ran into them in the SBPD’s main hallway.  “Shawn!” his father barked at him, “Call Gus, so he’ll stop calling me, already.  You’d think after everything I’ve taught you, you’d _remember_ to grab your phone from his car before he left the state, but no.  Not my son.”  Henry narrowed his eyes at Eliot and seemed to forget to continue his ‘Shawn’s a fuckup’ rant.  This one was either number 17 or number 4 in his arsenal, but he hadn’t continued long enough for Shawn to tell which it was.  “Who’s this, then?  Another one of your ‘clients’?  I told you, Shawn, you’re not getting another SBPD case until Gus is back to keep you under control.” 

Shawn rolled his eyes at his father.  “First of all, Henry, if this guy here _was_ a client, why would I be trolling the station for cases?  And secondly, I totally left my phone in Gus’s car on purpose.  Just in case he needed a backup phone for his backup phone, because you never know when both of your phones will simultaneously die and slash or be eaten by a grizzly on your work-related wilderness retreat.”  

“If he’s not a client, why are you dragging him around the station?  Did he drag you here?  Is someone _finally_ pressing charges against you?  Or is this another one of your _dates_?”  Shawn could sense Eliot trying to become unnoticeable beside him, but Shawn could have told him that it was impossible to become invisible in front of his father—not with that hair.

 

***

 

They ran into a man who was apparently Shawn’s father while Eliot was trying to hurry Shawn from the morgue to the station parking lot.  Eliot knew he looked more like a potential suspect right now than the cop he’d played earlier, and was getting antsy as they lingered.  There _were_ , after all, warrants out for his arrest, and he’d be screwed if someone recognized him from that wanted poster that had made the rounds a few years back.  Loitering in a cop shop wasn’t the best idea.  He hadn’t been worried about it when he was here earlier, because no one really ever looked past the uniform to the face, but he wasn’t in uniform now, and the detective who’d been yelling at Shawn when Eliot had been playing cop a few days ago was starting to look interested in the loud conversation Shawn’s dad was having in his son’s general direction.  He noticed the lanky detective organizing his folders in preparation for getting up, and decided it was time for them to get while the getting was still good.  

So, solely for the sake of a quick exit, Eliot bit the bullet and did what had to be done.  “Howdy,” he drawled at Shawn’s father, interrupting him mid-rant, “It’s nice to meet you, and all,” he pointedly didn’t offer a handshake, “but Shawn here and I’ve got a lunch reservation down at the Wharf.  We probably won’t see you around,” he added, wrapping a proprietary arm around Shawn’s shoulders and steering him out of the station while Shawn’s father turned an angry purple. 

“Shawn!  Get your ass back here, right-” Henry’s yell got cut off by the closing of the exterior doors. 

“Dude, you totally just made my dad’s Shit List in, like, less than a minute,” Shawn said admiringly as Eliot pulled him in the direction of the bike parked across the lot. 

 

***

 

Shawn didn’t know why Eliot was in such a hurry to get back to the hotel and his fellow merry men, but he didn’t object much.  He’d saved Shawn from being subjected to the rest of rant number 4 or 17, after all.  Maybe Eliot would turn into a pumpkin or something if he was away from the merry men (and women, Shawn was all about political correctness, sometimes, anyway) for too long.  That could definitely put quite a strain on a relationshi-  Shawn stopped that thought right there in its tracks and determinedly didn’t think any further on it.  He wasn’t going to go there.  Not happening.  …relationship with the dude.  Dammit.  It was like a stupid catchy pop song he couldn’t stop from running around and around in his head.  He’d totally distract himself by annoying Eliot, but A) the whole ‘driving 20 miles over the speed limit with accompanying engine and wind noise’ thing, and B) the ‘mouth muffled by a helmet that was totally necessary for continuing brain function in the event of a wreck’ thing made that a little impossible at the moment.  Shawn was stuck with his own thoughts, with no escape in sight.  He was beginning to understand how some people could possibly find him slightly annoying.  

He needed Gus.  Gus could snap him out of this… this… whatever this was.  But where was Gus when he needed him?  Out somewhere in the middle of some desert forest wilderness with the rest of his fellow pharmaceutical drones, getting eaten by bears or something like that.  Best friend _fail_.  

To distract himself from the dangerous and slash or disturbing direction his thoughts were tending towards in regards to the dude straddling the bike in front of him—driving Shawn’s motorcycle (That was _almost_ an innuendo.  He’d have to work on it before using it out loud.)—Shawn started composing an angry text mess- (couldn’t text Gus, he had Shawn’s phone) _email_ to Gus about his complete and utter failure at being there when Shawn needed him most. 

 

***

 

Eliot wasn’t sure whether to be pleased by or suspicious of Shawn’s silence.  Granted, it had only been two or three minutes since they’d left Shawn’s Norton in the hotel parking lot, but the quiet walk into the hotel and through the lobby was beginning to unnerve him.  It was like being with a quiet Hardison.  Or with a quiet two year old.  Quiet was bad.  It meant they were up to something.  But then quiet time ended while they were waiting for an elevator, and Eliot missed it immediately, even with the accompanying paranoia about the possible causes of the silence. 

“As much as I enjoyed snuggling against your broad and manly shoulders on the ride here, this totally isn’t the Wharf, and the hotel restaurant doesn’t take lunch reservations.  Is this all a plot to have your way with me, you nefarious man?”  Shawn simpered at him when the elevator bell dinged to signal an arriving elevator, apparently in order to make the two older ladies also waiting in front of the doors decide to wait and take the next available elevator, though Eliot’s growl only provoked a brilliant smile from Shawn. 

“ _Now_ can I borrow your phone?  You know Gus, he worries so.  Well, actually, you don’t know Gus, seeing as you’ve never met him, but I can tell you that he worries.  A lot.  And if I don’t call him, he’s going to keep calling Henry because he knows Henry won’t just not answer, and that’s going to irritate Henry even more than he already is and then he’ll track me down—Henry, not Gus, that gooey double chocolate chip cookie is in Arizona—and I’m thinking that would be really awkward for you when my ex-SBPD Detective and current SBPD Consultant Liaison father tracks me down to your… lair.  Hideout?  Den of iniquity?  What’s that thing that thieves have called anyway?  Safe house?  Anyway, it’d just be awkward.  Especially because you’re all planning, like, this big heist or something, right?  So you should totally let me call Gus and prevent the coming awkwardness.” 

“Fine, already!” Eliot snarled.  Anything to end the talking.  He flipped his phone at the guy, and it hit him in the chest.  Hard.  Before falling to the floor of the elevator when Shawn fumbled the catch.  That one definitely wouldn’t be playing any triple-A ball anytime soon. 

 

***

 

“Hey Gus!” 

“Your phone’s in my car, Shawn.  That Gina girl keeps calling.  What the hell did you say to her _this_ time?” 

“Something about cheesecake.  I don’t remember.  She should really change her number.  And I know it is, Gus, I just called you on it.”

Gus was silent, like a silent thing.  

“Anyway, there’s this guy-” Shawn continued. 

“Can’t you just be yourself for once?” Gus interrupted him with an exasperated sigh.  “Why do you never want to be you?  I keep telling you that pretending to be someone new for each person you date is going to backfire on you, but you never believe me.” 

“Come on, Gus, why wouldn’t I want to be me?  I’m awesome and full of pineappley goodness.” Shawn lied, stifling the strange urge to tell Gus _why_ he constantly reinvented himself through new personas and names and jobs, about the near-constant dissatisfaction with his life and own personality that drove him to run as far and fast as he could when things got real and people saw the real him, to run away before he was all exposed and real and discovered, yet again, that they liked the façade better than they liked the real Shawn.  “And anyway, it’s not like that.”

Gus's silence was extremely judgey this time. 

“Gus, your silences are more expressive than most people’s ten minute monologues.  But it really, _really_ isn’t like that, pinky swear.” 

“Shawn, you broke the sanctity of the pinky swear in third grade when I told you I liked Jeanie Andrews and you told Jimmy Nichols so he wouldn’t steal your lunch money for a week.” 

“Fine!  Whatever.  That was in _third grade_ , Gus!” 

The elevator bell announced their arrival to Eliot’s team’s floor, and Eliot growled something at Shawn to the effect of, “Will you wrap it up already?  We’re here.  Stop talking about third grade and cheesecake and get to the point.”  

“Whose phone are you using, Shawn?” Gus asked suspiciously.  “This is a Massachusetts area code and my phone says you’re calling from Boston.  Oh my God, you’re not in Boston, are you?  Shawn?  _Shawn!_ ” 

“No, I’m not in Boston.  I told you, Gus, there’s this guy, and he and the rest of his crew of international thieves are modern day versions of Robin Hood and his gang of merry men, and they take out rich and powerful bad guys who are hurting innocent poor people and send them to jail.  Or kill them, I’m not sure.  But anyway, they want my help with something to do with taking down a ring of Coyote people who are smuggling prostitutes across the border.  Are Coyote people like those furry people things you hung out with that time when you dragged me to the nerd convention?” 

“Shawn, if you don’t want to tell me why you’re in Boston, you could have just said so.  And it was the San Diego Comic Con, not a nerd convention.” Shawn made a face at Gus through the phone, knowing Gus would know he was being made faces at, and followed Eliot out of the elevator and down the hall to the Merry Men's HQ. 

“Gus, I’m telling you the truth!  Eliot, tell him I’m telling him the truth.”  Shawn held out the phone in Eliot’s direction, but the dude just glared at him and made a ‘wrap it up’ motion with one hand as he opened the door to the hotel suite.  “Okay, he won’t tell you I’m telling you the truth, but I totally am.  He’s just the strong, silent type.  Their names are Nate Ford, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Sophie something, and Parker.  I’m not sure if Parker’s her first or last name, come to think of it.” 

“Shawn, I was with you the last time you broke into Detective Lassiter’s house, remember?  I might not have an eidetic memory, but even I can remember half the names on Lassiter’s ‘Wall of Wanted’ or whatever that creepy shrine is.  I think he makes them up, because I couldn’t find any of them the last time I was Googling.  Stop rattling off the names from the pretty pictures and be back in Santa Barbara when I get back, or I’ll sic your dad on you.” 

“Gus, I-” Eliot snatched the phone back from him and pressed the ‘end call’ button a little aggressively, in Shawn’s opinion.  “Hey!  What…” Shawn started to protest, but trailed off as Eliot’s glare registered.  

“What the hell?  You told him our names on an open line?  Did you think we couldn't hear, or wouldn't care, or that no one else might be monitoring your call?  Are you _trying_ to get us caught?  He _does_ work for the cops, Nate.”  The guy who Gus wanted to grow up to be was glaring at him too.  As was the little blonde bastion of evil and tasers that called herself Parker.  In fact, they all were, including the Sophie-lady who Shawn hadn’t met yet, but he assumed she was the Sophie-lady and the Maid Marion to the Nate-boss’s Robin Hood from their body language, the way their bodies were turned towards each other even though the way they were both glaring at him made their stances look uncomfortable. 

“Um… Sorry?”  Shawn offered weakly in answer to the synergistic glares.  “By your glares combined, I am Captain Wrath,” he muttered to himself.  

The guy Gus wanted to be when he grew up was muttering to himself as he turned back to his computer, apparently in search of the solace of the Internet.  “Googling.  Of course he couldn’t find us by _Googling_ us.  I could hack Google in my sleep…”  Shawn stopped paying attention, because the Nate-boss was talking at him now. 

“We’ll discuss _that_ later.  Now, I want you to tell me everything you know about Damian Moreau.  _Everything._ ”

 

 

 

 **6.**  

“Everything?” Shawn asked weakly.  “Um.  He’s maybe French with a last name like that?  I don’t know—I thought you knew it’s- I wasn’t- I’m not really a damned psychic!” he floundered, feeling a little out of his depth.  Shawn saw Eliot roll his eyes (and really, he needed to not keep looking at the guy all the time, not if he didn’t want the hitman to find out about his apparent thing-transference and, well, hit him) and when he cut his eyes towards the Nate-boss-thing, _he_ just blinked at Shawn.  Somehow managing to convey infinite patience with just the lowering and raising of his eyelids, which was, Shawn had to admit, pretty damn cool.  Likely a skill Shawn himself would never have the opportunity to use, though Gus would be all over that like chocolate on… er, chocolate.  Gus (for some inexplicable reason) always felt the need to physically express his vast reservoirs of patience in Shawn’s presence. 

With a quick blink (that conveyed, if anything, the fact that all of the eyes staring at Shawn were beginning to give Shawn a slight twitch in the corner of his right eye, because he liked the spotlight, sure, but only when he chose to be in it and wasn’t being ganged up on like a wigger wearing Blood colors in Crip territory) Shawn yanked himself back from his mental tangent and started paying attention again.  No one was talking, so either they hadn’t started yet or were waiting for an answer.  Silence was probably his best option.  He could totally wait them out.

 

***

 

“Seriously, I don’t know what you mean, ‘ _everything_.’  It’s not like I’ve got his résumé, or rap sheet—if he’s got one, and hey, lots of people do, no judging—hidden up my bicep-flattering sleeve or anything,” Shawn continued a few seconds later, sounding a little nervous.  At least to Eliot, anyway.  The eye-twitch was new and different too.  So Eliot figured that Shawn was either a compulsive liar telling the truth, an honest man backed into a lie, or that the guy was pretty sure that the team was plotting ways to hide his body after they were finished with him.  Eliot immediately tossed out one of the options and pondered the other two while Nate talked.  Not that it mattered.  Nate was too… too… Eliot didn’t know what word he was searching for exactly, but he did know that even if Shawn was worrying about the third option, Nate wasn’t ever going to let it happen.  He also felt slightly ashamed for the brief flare of disappointment at the thought of not getting to dispose of Shawn’s body.  Just because the guy was annoying didn’t mean Eliot should be contemplating hiding the body already.  This blackmail thing was just really pushing all his buttons, and lately he’d been feeling like he was on a hair trigger. 

His hand was still aching from when he’d jabbed his fingers into a guy’s trachea the other week, so Eliot absentmindedly cracked his knuckles.  He struggled against a smirk when the sound made Shawn jump and look around at him a little wildly before opening his mouth again.  “Oh my god, seriously, don’t sic him on me again, I really don’t know anything more than—just that this Moreau dude is coming to stay at the hotel in a few weeks and is kinda shady and that Cruz is throwing him a ‘please please like me, you’re totally my hero and I want to grow up to be just like you and also want you to give me money for something because you’re richer than God,’ party.  Though that’s paraphrased from the invitations I saw on his desk.  I figure he’s not really gonna call it that, call the party that, because that would be a little creepy and off-putting, don’t you think?” 

Eliot forced back a chuckle and started wondering how, exactly, he’d gone from finding Shawn annoying to finding him funny in less than three minutes.

 

***

 

Shawn catalogued the looks around him.  Nate looked disappointed and elated at the same time, Sophie was tapping one finger against her pursed lips with a faraway look in her eyes, Parker was… nowhere to be seen, Alec had a frown of concentration on his face as he tapped away at the keyboard of one of his laptops, and Eliot was… trying not to smile?  Shawn took a deep breath.  It was over, and it hadn’t even been painful at all.  Well, except for all the adrenaline currently buzzing through his system, but that wasn’t really painful, just made the whole world seem like Shawn had sped up in relation to it, and he doubted that he’d forget a second of the interrogation.  Not that he would have anyway, but still.  He was almost a little disappointed, after the fact, at the lack of thumbscrews and beatings—but only almost.  He could always add them in later when he was telling the story to Gus. 

“So…” Shawn ventured cautiously, “am I free to go now?” 

Eliot looked like he was about to say ‘yeah, sure, you betcha,” or whatever was Texan, or Oklahoman, or just generic Southern for ‘yes,’ but Nate beat him to the punch.  (A very apt metaphor for Eliot, he’d have to remember to use that one out loud before they all disappeared back to wherever they came from.)  “No,” Nate said firmly, with a gleam in his eye that Shawn couldn’t decipher, but made him nervous anyway.  “No, you’re gonna get us invitations to that party.”  He started turning away to face the rest of his crew of merry men, throwing a quick, “Eliot, keep an eye on him,” over his shoulder before grinning like a maniac at Sophie and saying, “Okay, guys.  Let’s steal us a party.”  Shawn saw Eliot roll his eyes at that last and guessed it was an in-crowd cliché.  Or that he just didn’t want to babysit Shawn again.

 

***

 

Eliot risked the elevator going down this time, no longer worrying about being trapped in it with Shawn.  He guessed that the guy was growing on him.  Like a fungus, but still.  He didn’t find him quite as insufferably annoying as before.  

“So, what’s the Nate-boss mean, I’m going to ‘get’ you guys invitations?  It didn’t look like it was going to be that big of a party, so, I mean, if I just grab some, Cruz is probably gonna know you’re not who you’re pretending to be.”  Shawn asked him as he fidgeted in the slowly descending elevator.  Eliot was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest and watching Shawn with mild amusement as the guy paced and flung his arms around and kept searching his pockets for something that obviously wasn’t there. 

“No clue,” he drawled.  “He’ll probably come up with some grand plan in a couple of hours or days though, don’t worry.  He doesn’t mean for you to do it alone.”  His cell phone rang and he answered it without looking at the caller ID.  A mistake.  He’d assumed it was Nate or Hardison telling him to come back and get an earbud.  “Spencer.  I’ve already got it in from earlier today.  Are you going senile already, old man?”  An answer that would work for either of them, because Nate was, well, old, and Hardison was freaking out over his upcoming quarterlife crisis or whatever.  He hadn’t really been paying attention. 

“Hello,” a smooth voice responded after a second of confused silence.  “This is Burton Guster.  Did a man name Shawn recently borrow your phone, and if so, is he still around?  May I please speak to him?” 

Eliot pulled the phone away from his face and stared at it for a moment.  Yup, there it was, right above the call timer: ’Burton Guster calling.’  Eliot valiantly restrained the urge to tell the guy that Shawn wasn’t available because they’d already dumped the body, but he figured Nate wouldn’t be happy if Eliot got the cops sicced on them.  “Uh, sure,” he replied warily, and tossed the phone in Shawn’s direction.  Shawn flailed wildly, but managed to catch it this time without dropping it. 

“What’s up, Gus?”  Shawn had glanced at the caller ID before putting the phone to his ear, unlike Eliot.  Eliot leaned back against the elevator wall and watched Shawn.  “No, I know, you’re right.  It’d be so cool though, if I _was_ hanging out with a crew of modern-day Robin Hoods, though, wouldn’t it?”  Eliot relaxed a little at that.  Shawn listened for a second or two and grinned into the phone, shooting Eliot a mischievous look.  “No, I’m not in Boston.  Spencer-” he paused for a second, listening, “I know, that’s what gave me the idea.  But no, it’s his first name.  Spencer’s a construction dude, he’s in town to bid on a contract for the _De La Cruz Hotel_ remodel.”  There was a brief silence on Shawn’s end, and Eliot dredged up the vague memory of seeing one of those ‘how it’s gonna look when it’s finished’ displays in the lobby. 

Shawn was good.  This was actually plausible, unlike the truth. 

“Who couldn’t resist hanging out with me, Gus?  Plus he’s got the whole totally hot ‘construction guy from the Village People’ thing going for him.”  Shawn made a face at the phone as he listened to Gus, and Eliot suddenly wished he could hear both sides of the conversation.  “No, Gus, I don’t know how long he’s going to be in town and I don’t know if you’ll get to meet him.”  Eliot raised his eyebrows, but Shawn refused to meet Eliot's eyes, staring determinedly at the bottom right corner of the elevator. 

“Guuuus,” Shawn whined over the ding of the elevator arriving at the lobby, “Yes, fine, you caught me.”  He winced and shot a look at Eliot out of the corner of his eye and muttered, “I do not _like_ him like him.”  Eliot smirked.  “I’ve got to go, Gus, I’ll call you later.  No! No, no, no no no.  I’ll call you, promise.”  He glared at the phone for a moment before hitting the end button and tossing it back to Eliot.  He glared at Eliot for a second too, before Shawn’s face relaxed into the familiar easy smile Eliot was already used to.  “After you,” he said, making a grand sweeping gesture for Eliot to precede him out of the elevator.  

Eliot rolled his eyes, smirked, shook his head, and left the elevator first.  Though he waited right outside the doors for Shawn to catch up, falling back to walk on the guy’s eight.

 

***

 

“You know, it’s really hard not to feel like I’m talking to myself when I’m talking to you when you’re always walking slightly behind me and to the left,” Shawn complained to Eliot as they pushed out of the big glass doors of the hotel lobby onto the sidewalk.  Shawn was slightly envious as Eliot produced shades from who knows where, flipping them open and sliding them on in one smooth motion.  He also managed to look nothing like Horatio from _CSI: Miami_ while doing it, for which Shawn was endlessly grateful.  Horatio had practically ruined sunglasses for Shawn. 

Eliot smirked at Shawn from behind his sunglasses as Shawn shaded his eyes with his hand.  Where the hell were his… back at the Psych office, being worn by the pineapple on top of the bookshelf.  Because that was _totally_ helping him right now.  The sun had finally burned off the morning mist and it seemed like it was trying to make up for the lost hours by being extra bright and extra hot.  “You know what?”  Shawn asked Eliot snarkily, and strode off without waiting for an answer.  

He bet Eliot didn’t know how to surf.  He’d have his revenge.  And plus, there were always sunglasses kiosks near the beach. 

Shawn walked fairly briskly in the direction of the beach, leaving his bike in the hotel parking lot.  It’d be safer there than at the beach.  “Nate doesn’t have his ‘grand plan’ yet, right?” he asked, craning his neck to look at Eliot, who was still slightly behind him and to his left.  Eliot grunted a negative.  “Cool.”  Shawn aimed himself at the familiar little surf shop (the fact it was painted an eye-blinding purple had nothing to do with why it was his favorite one, or course) near the pier.  He wondered how Johnny was doing, and if he’d meant what he’d said about the discount the next time Shawn came in for a board.  

The door to the shop was propped open, so Shawn reached up to tinkle the little bell with his fingers as he stepped inside.  Johnny looked up from where he was waxing a board at the workshop end of the store and his face lit up when he saw Shawn.  “Dude,” Johnny grinned as he wove his way through the store to Shawn, “finally getting back to the waves?” 

Shawn reciprocated the manly hand-grab-and-hug that Johnny initiated, seeing a slightly bemused look on Eliot’s face when he glanced back at him.  “It’s time,” he said solemnly, and Johnny’s face brightened another couple hundred watts.  Then he caught sight of Eliot hovering behind Shawn and his face went completely blank.  Shawn started to feel a little nervous as Johnny just stared at Eliot without saying anything.  

Finally, after what seemed like hours of awkward silence filled with Shawn fidgeting and Eliot starting to shift uneasily at being the victim of Johnny’s blank stare, Johnny switched on again, like he’d been a robot going through an automatic reboot or something.  “Oh.  My.  _God_.  You’re Roy Chappell!  Dude.  You have to sign my board.  You’re _Roy Chappell_!  I saw you on the Boston farm team—you were amazing!  Have they finally moved you up to the majors yet?”  Now it was Shawn’s turn to stare blankly as Eliot relaxed into an easy grin. 

 

***

 

“Nah, that’s my twin you’re thinkin’ of,” Eliot drawled slowly, keeping in mind the story Shawn had told Gus in the elevator.  Shawn obviously knew this guy pretty well, and Eliot didn’t want to complicate things further by being Roy as well.  “Spencer Chappell,” he grinned wryly and held out a hand for Johnny to shake.  “I’m in construction, in town on business.”  Johnny looked pretty disappointed, but shook Eliot’s hand anyway.  

“Man, you look exactly like him,” Johnny observed glumly. 

“Identical twins, but he got all the baseball genes,” Eliot shrugged, hoping the guy would drop it, and he did. 

Johnny turned back to Shawn, all grins again.  “Short board still?” 

“Pshaw, yeah, like you’re ever gonna get me on a long board again,” Shawn grinned and slapped Johnny’s back, and then the two of them descended into technical jargon while Eliot gazed on in glazed boredom.  

 

 

 

 **7.**  

Shawn financed his new board and Eliot’s board and all the other completely necessary surfing paraphernalia—i.e., trunks, because thank god they were in SoCal and not Washington or Oregon or Canada (those guys were hardcore, had to wear full-on wetsuits in the middle of August just to ward off hypothermia)—with Gus’s American Express.  The AmEx that Shawn had _mysteriously acquired_ and in no way lifted from Gus’s wallet the last time they hit up Cheng’s for the first-class jerked chicken.  Johnny knew the score and didn’t comment when Shawn forged a loopy _Burton Guster_ at the bottom of the slip. 

Shawn took advantage of Johnny’s curtained-off alcove to change into his new board shorts, and Eliot followed suit once he’d finished.  And then, dude came out of the changing room, and the charges on Gus’s card were suddenly _soo_ worth it, even if Gus made him pay for them again.  Even if Eliot was a pro-caliber surfer and Shawn didn’t get to watch him biting it repeatedly in the surf.  Because _damn_.  He suppressed an admiring whistle and might possibly have shifted his crumpled up street clothes in front of his groin while he took a minute to get himself under control.  

Shawn led the way out of the surf shop and to the beach, putting up a hand to shield his eyes from the fierce glare of the lowering sun.  He was briefly amazed that it was still Thursday, even if it was early evening.  It was summer and the days were longer, sure, but it felt like enough had happened today that it should have been, like, Tuesday already.  Meeting Parker and Eliot in the ventilation shafts this morning already felt like it had happened a week ago.  He wondered if Eliot was going to babysit him that night, too.  Because Shawn could _totally_ work with that.

 

***

 

“So, are we completely forgetting about the reason we came here in the first place, or are we not going after the guys we _came here after_ now that Moreau’s in your sights?”  Eliot could hear Hardison laying into Nate over the earbud.  “Not that I’m against, you know, taking the bastard down so our lives aren’t being held in the hands of some crazy Italian bitch-lady, but the client hired us to go after this coyote gang thing, remember?  What are we gonna do, tell her ‘sorry your sister’s dead, but we figured we’d let the people who killed her go free because we had more important things to do’?  Tell me that’s gonna go over well.”  In the brief silence that followed the remark, Eliot wondered if Hardison was crushing on the client again.  Throw something pretty and helpless and admiring and under thirty at Hardison, and he was immediately head over heels.  And truthfully, most of their clients usually fit at least three out of four of those criteria.  Maybe someone other than Hardison should start compiling their list of potential clients. 

“Hardison,” Shawn looked over at Eliot, brief confusion painting his face before he must have figured out Eliot wasn’t talking to him.  Eliot faced Shawn anyway, so he could talk at a normal volume and not look like he was bat-shit insane.  “Hardison,” he repeated, waiting for acknowledgement as Hardison kept ranting at Nate.  

“What?”  Hardison finally snapped back at Eliot after he’d repeated his name a few more times. 

“Just letting you know I’m taking out my earbud for a while, and won’t be near my phone.” 

“What the hell, man?  Why are you taking out your earbud?  And who the hell wanders away from their phone—did you lose it or something?  Was it compromised?  How am I supposed to know if you’re in it up to your ears, if you don’t tell me these things?” 

Eliot snorted.  “Phone’s fine.  Taking out the earbud because they don’t react well to water, _remember_?  I’m certainly never gonna forget.  Fucker stings like a bitch when it shorts, did I mention that the last time?  When, exactly, are you gonna waterproof the things?” 

“I’m working on it,” Hardison muttered in his ear.  “Why are you getting wet?” 

Eliot rolled his eyes, to Shawn’s obvious amusement.  The guy had just been staring at him this whole time, and Eliot was starting to feel a little self-conscious.  “Babysitting, remember?  Shawn wants to play in the ocean.”  It was Shawn’s turn to roll his eyes and Eliot smirked as Shawn huffed out a breath, crossed his arms, and started to pout.  Seriously, pout.  Just like Eliot’s eight-year-old nephew. 

“Whatever, man.  Don’t get eaten by sharks.  Let me know when you’re back online.”  Hardison sounded kinda exasperated.  Which made Shawn’s whole ‘surfing adventure’ thing sit a little easier in Eliot’s mind. 

“I’m not one of your computers, Hardison, so stop talking like I am,” Eliot growled into the earbud before stuffing it in one of his jeans’ pockets and tossing them on the sand next to Shawn’s pile of clothes. 

 

***

 

Shawn swooned a little, deep inside where Eliot would never see it, when Eliot growled again.  Shawn stabbed his board down into the sand to cover the momentary weakness of his knees.  Yup.  His ‘thing’ had definitely switched targets, from Lassy to Ellie- Eliot.  He didn’t even dare to think ‘Ellie’ inside the safety of his own mind, sure somehow that the hitman would find out and hit him.  Probably only a little, though.  He was pretty sure he was growing on one Eliot Spencer.  Eliot hadn’t tried to choke him into unconsciousness for, like, whole hours now.  He was totally gonna get to hit that tonight.  Or get to be hit by that tonight.  (In only the best sense of the phrase, of course, hopefully.) 

He swiftly stepped behind his board for cover and shoved those images out of his mind, thinking of baseball—apparently, Eliot played baseball, so that wasn’t really helping (and he was gonna have to check the internet for videos of that because that sounded nothing if not hot)—thinking of Yang, always a surefire inappropriate-erection killer, even if her name rhymed with wang, because she was, well, fucking crazy, and thinking about her in her little white room at the nuthouse always reminded him of the fact that Yin was still out there.  So maybe it was a good thing he had a bodyguard slash babysitter shadowing his every move. 

In the few moments it took him to ponder his eventual demise and really _really_ hope that it wasn’t going to be at the hands of some crazy crossword puzzle fanatic like Mary’s had been, Eliot had grabbed up his board and headed towards the water.  (What was Shawn going to do with Eliot’s board when Eliot left ~~him~~ Santa Barbara?  He hadn’t thought that far ahead.  He could try and get Gus to use it, but Gus always complained that the beach messed with his complexion.  Or that he burned easily, which Shawn honestly didn’t get.  He was pretty sure chocolatey goodness didn’t burn—or, at least, 67 percent sure he'd never seen Gus with a sunburn, anyway.  Maybe Eliot would take the board with him as something to remember Shawn by?  He didn’t think there was much surfing to be had in Boston, so that would have to be the reason, right?) 

Shawn took a moment, after he yanked his board back out of the sand, to watch Eliot bound through the surf and smoothly jump on his board and duck under a wave before paddling further out.  It looked like dude knew what he was doing.  Hopefully Shawn wasn’t the one about to be schooled.  Shawn heaved a sigh that was half resignation and half admiration, and followed Eliot out into the water.

 

***

 

“No, man, things aren’t ‘cool as pineapple in the freezer’, what the fuck does that even mean?” Eliot gritted out, pressing Shawn’s wadded up t-shirt against the guy’s freely-bleeding head wound.  Head wounds bled like a bitch regardless, but Shawn’s pupils weren’t the same size, and Eliot had picked up enough field medicine over the years to know that that was one of the signs of a concussion.  Keeping the t-shirt pressed to Shawn’s head and ignoring his mumbled complaints, Eliot fumbled through the pockets of his jeans without bothering to pull them out of the pile of clothes.  He shoved the earbud in his ear—hoping he wasn’t still damp enough to make it spark, because damn, that had hurt so fucking much the last time he’d thought he’d lost an eardrum—and filled Hardison in on the situation while he searched his jeans one-handedly for his cell phone so he could call 911 for an ambulance. 

“Idiot fell off his board and got pulled down by the rip, bashed his head on some coral or rock or something, gave himself a concussion.  Taking him to the hospital, need you to meet me there with an ID or something that says I’m Spencer Chappell—yeah, yeah, I know, don’t even say it, but some baseball fan here saw me there and I said I was my twin brother.  Backstory is I’m from Boston, work for a construction company, here in town to bid on the remodel of Cruz’s hotel.”  Eliot spit it all out as quickly as he could.  His searching fingers found his cell, and he immediately dialed 911.  

“But, can’t leave the boards at the beach, won’t be able to not surf in Boston!” Shawn whined incoherently. Eliot ignored him in order to tell the dispatcher where they were on the beach, and she promised to send a bus to come get them. 

“We’ll get Johnny to come grab them,” he soothed Shawn, and singled out one of the slowly gathering crowd of onlookers with a pointed finger and a ‘come here’ motion.  “Can you run up to Johnny’s surf shop and get him to come down and grab our boards?” he asked the skinny kid, and the boy nodded with a touch of hero worship in his eyes (Eliot had gotten pretty familiar with the expression since he’d gone white hat and started working for Nate) and took off running towards the screamingly purple building that housed Johnny’s store. 

“Jesus, you really do need a babysitter,” Eliot muttered under his breath at Shawn, and readjusted the crumpled t-shirt in an effort to more fully staunch the streaming blood.  Shawn whined wordlessly, which pretty much just reinforced Eliot’s sentiment.

 

***

 

‘Overnight observation’ were a few of Shawn’s most hated words, right up there with ‘Here, put on this apple suit.’  (Those commercials were never going to stop haunting him.  The next time he had to go undercover on a TV set he was going to make an extra special effort to avoid anyone with a headset on.)  Especially now.  Because Eliot was going to spend his night getting a crick in his neck sleeping in one of the hospital room chairs, most likely, as opposed to crashing at Shawn’s apartment—and if Shawn had had his way, in Shawn’s bed.  Though maybe he was getting a little ahead of himself there.  He was finding it hard to track his thoughts at the moment—concussions always did that to him.  He’d settle with a kiss.  Or even just a hint that Eliot didn’t think of him as the neighborhood’s eight-year-old problem child that no one wants to sit for anymore and have to be bribed, blackmailed, or coerced into watching over. 

Shawn hated hospitals.  A significant part of it was the smell, the stench of antiseptic and sick people, but mostly it was all the orders and instructions and following the rules.  If he’d wanted to mindlessly obey orders, he’d have entered the academy like Henry had wanted him to, or maybe have joined the military and become some sort of super-assassin like Eliot.  But, he hadn’t.  Because following orders felt the same way stealing sips of Lassy’s coffee did—screaming pain in the hinge of his jaw from the over-the-top sweetness.  Except following orders made his brain hurt like that, not his jaw.  Because no one would ever explain _why_ he had to do these things in sufficient detail to have them make sense to him.  For instance, why did he have to not-sleep at the hospital with its fuzzy, scrambled basic cable and antiseptic reek and sick people and complete lack of things to do when he could not-sleep at the Psych office or his apartment, both of which had way more in the way of entertainment to offer and neither of which smelled like someone was scouring his nose with vomit-scented Clorox? 

Neither Eliot or the emergency room doctor would listen to his totally reasonable logic, though, so he started plotting his escape.  However, he was a little fuzzy on how he was going to distract Eliot long enough to make his escape.  The guy was watching him like a hawk.  Or, at least, like… like something that watches something a lot and really closely.  Shawn winced and reached up to finger the bandage over his stitches again.  He hoped it wouldn’t scar, but luckily it was right on his forehead so they hadn’t had to shave his head or anything.  He could work a scar, maybe tell people he’d fought off a great white or saved a helpless kitten from a fiery car accident or something. 

 

***

 

Eliot eyed Shawn suspiciously, wishing he had a pair of handcuffs or a couple of zip strips, and not only because Shawn’s fidgeting was getting on his nerves.  He didn’t trust Shawn to stay put if Eliot had to hit the bathroom or the vending machine.  Eliot had seen him wrapping the nurses around his little finger and knew they’d believe anything the guy told them, and Shawn had made no bones earlier about not wanting to stay in the hospital.  He wasn’t even sure if one of his team would be able to withstand the hangdog expression Shawn had already tried on him a few times—to no effect—even if they weren’t otherwise occupied by working on tracking down the people-smugglers or trying to come up with a way to crash Moreau’s party.  Hardison had only popped by long enough to toss Eliot a wallet with the Spencer Chappell identification in it—the ID wasn’t a bad one for being such a rush job, and had passed the hospital‘s casual inspection with flying colors.  

Eliot rolled his eyes when Shawn whimpered as he messed with the bandage on his head again.  “Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘if it hurts, stop doing it’?” he asked acidly, leaning over from the chair beside the bed to pull Shawn’s hand away from his face and drop the unresisting limb back down at Shawn’s side. 

“No.  Maybe.  And how will I know if it still hurts if I don’t keep touching it?” Shawn asked in a disturbingly reasonable tone. 

Eliot gritted his teeth and leaned back in the chair.  “The same way people know a tree makes a sound if it falls in the forest and no one hears it,” he forced out through his clenched teeth. “By using fucking _common sense_.  Don’t you have a boyfriend to call or something?  Let that Burton guy know you’re in the hospital?” 

Shawn gaped at him.  “ _Gus_ isn’t my _boyfriend!_ ” Eliot had only ever heard that tone before from girls he’d thrown frogs at in grade school.  

Eliot refrained from pointing out that he hadn’t actually said Gus was Shawn’s boyfriend, because he knew from experience that arguing with a concussed person was like trying to start a fire with ice cubes and friction.  The tense feeling in the back of his skull was already warning him of the headache to come if he kept up this conversation.  “Whatever.  If you don’t call him, I will, and I’ll tell him how you got your concussion, too,” Eliot threatened, hoping that would be the end of it. 

Shawn looked at him pityingly.  “Eliot, Eliot, _Eliot_.  We both know that if you _really_ wanted to freak Gus out and make me suffer, you’d tell him I got it bungee jumping without a helmet again, not the _truth_.” 

Eliot blinked at the _we_ and the  _again_ , but just tossed his cell beside Shawn on the hospital bed and settled back into the garish and uncomfortable bedside chair, crossing his arms and trying to find something else in the bare room to stare at while Shawn fumbled with the buttons. A few minutes later, Eliot was starting to suspect that Shawn had navigated to the games menu rather than making any effort to call or text his friend, when the hospital room door banged open—as much as a door with a hydraulic hinge was able to bang open—and Shawn’s dad strode into the room.  At least Eliot now knew where Shawn’s drama queen genes came from.  

“Shawn!  What did I tell you about taking my name off of your call list?  What the hell did you do to yourself _this_ time?”  Eliot couldn’t tell if Spencer Senior was genuinely irritated or just covering up paternal worry with blustering anger, but he took the opportunity to slip unnoticed out of the room.  He’d hit the john down the hall and maybe grab something from the vending machine if he had time.  He was pretty confident that the two of them would still be arguing when he got back, because he doubted Shawn’s dad would respond any more favorably to Shawn’s puppy dog eyes than Eliot himself had, and wasn’t that a slightly repugnant thought, comparing himself to Shawn’s dad.  He could already tell the guy had more issues than Shawn did, and that was saying something.  

He could hear them still bickering all the way down the hall when he came out of the john.  _God_ , this was like the day that just wouldn’t end.

 

 

 

 

 **8.**  

Shawn blinked groggily at the nurse who was trying to pinch his hand off at the wrist with her icy claw.  Didn’t they have fancy machines for pulse-taking now?  “Oh, you’re awake!” she beamed at him, “How are we feeling this morning?”  Why did nurses always talk to him like he was a five year old? 

“Like Maxwell’s silver hammer is tap-dancing inside my skull,” he groaned, weakly trying to tug his wrist out of her grasp. 

“Great, now I’m gonna have that song stuck in my head for the rest of the day,” someone drawled from across the room. 

“El- Spencer!  You’re still here,” completely astonished, Shawn noticed Eliot slouching up against the wall next to the window like he was the only thing holding it up.  How’d he miss seeing him?  The guy was right there in plain sight. 

“What did you think, ‘I’m not gonna leave’ meant, anyway?” Eliot asked him with a smirk. 

“That you were going to sneak out as soon as I fell asleep,” Shawn answered frankly.  The nurse finally let him have his wrist back, and he rubbed at it with a pout aimed in her direction.  She looked kinda besotted at the bickering, and he guessed she was the one who’d looked the other way while Eliot spent the night in his room.  An avid aficionado of romance novels, probably. 

Eliot just gave Shawn a look and started asking the nurse some in-depth questions about how Shawn was doing and when he could be released from the hospital.  Shawn ignored them in favor of trying to remember his night in the hospital—apparently, eidetic memory couldn’t quite contend with a concussion.  He knew that he’d dozed, and that someone had woken him up every hour to ask him inane questions, but he couldn’t remember what the questions had been or what he’d answered or who had asked them.  Or much of anything, really.  If this was how normal people remembered stuff, he was almost glad his dad had made him a freak.  

The cell phone in Shawn’s lap started skittering over the sheets and Shawn jumped about a mile.  “Holy shit!”  He’d forgotten it was there, and the sudden buzz against his thighs was… startling.  Eliot held out a hand for it and Shawn fumbled it to him, glad the dude hadn’t just grabbed for it.  That would have been very slightly awkward.  Eliot ignored the dirty look the nurse gave him and her gesture at the posted ‘no cellphones’ sign on the wall, and went out into the hall to take the call. 

“It’s probably his work,” Shawn excused him, trying to make the nurse like them again.  “He forgot to call them yesterday when this,” he waved his hand at his head and the room in general, “happened, and he had a meeting this morning, I think.”  The nurse’s glare softened.  Score.  “So, when do you think I can blow this popsicle stand?” He asked, complete with charming grin number 3. 

“You’re doing fine,” she smiled at him.  “After the doctor comes to check on you and okays it, your boyfriend can get started on the paperwork while you get dressed.”  Shawn didn’t correct her.  If she wanted to assume Eliot—Spencer Chappell—was his boyfriend, that was perfectly fine by him. 

 

***

 

“I don’t think ‘coyote ring’ is what they’re called, Hardison,” Eliot bickered.  He hadn’t gone off comms while in the hospital since they’d been nowhere near the ICU, but Hardison hadn’t trusted his high-strength extra special signal not to interfere with something important, and had cut Eliot's line off anyway.  Personally, Eliot thought it was all a load of crap, like the whole ‘cell phones interfering with plane instruments’ thing.    

“Whatever, man.  We’ve got a lead on them, and one of Cruz’s contacts on this side of the border has something to do with that remodel on his hotel, so we’re sending you in.  That Boston construction company shit that your guy made up is actually gonna come in handy—you’re going in as Spencer Chappell, since the ID’s already made up and you’ve been working that story long enough it’s easy to make look legit.” 

“What about Shawn?”  Eliot asked, peeking around the half-open door into the hospital room to watch Shawn charming the nurse, arguing amicably about something or other while she tried not to laugh. 

“What about him?”  Hardison sounded confused. 

“The guy _concussed_ himself at the _beach_ , Hardison.  He needs watching,” Eliot said flatly. 

“Is this that Stockholm Syndrome or something?” Hardison asked suspiciously. 

“That’s kidnapping, man.”  Eliot thought about it for a second and sighed.  “But yeah, probably is.  Who’s gonna watch him while I go undercover?” 

Hardison sighed, sounding put upon.  “You know you sound like a single mom, right?  Well, a single mom who’s, like, a cop or something.  Fine, I’ll send Parker over.” 

“Tell her ‘no tasers.’” Eliot growled, making a mental note to do something unspecified and horrible to Hardison at his earliest opportunity to get him back for that ‘single mom’ comment, and forcing himself not to fear for all of Santa Barbara at the prospect of Shawn and Parker teaming up. 

“Yeah, yeah.  She’s on her way.  So, Cruz’s guy is named Antonio Valdez, goes by Tonio, and is a subcontractor here bidding on something to do with the pool.  I’m guessing that the remodel’s a way to slip him his money for the last shipment of people.  He gets a lot of his supplies from Mexico and Central America, so that’s probably one of the ways they’re bringing people in.  I’m pretty sure Tonio’s just a soft-core people smuggler, no drugs or murder for hire or anything, but we can use him to get to the guys up top.  He seems like a nice guy, on paper at least, so you might try to turn him and see if you can use him against Cruz.  Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t really care about the whole illegal immigrants thing, as long as they don’t do the shit we’re going after Cruz for.” 

“Did you put in a bid from my company?  What’s it called, anyway, and where am I on the corporate ladder?”  Eliot was reserving judgment on Hardison’s assumption that Tonio was a ‘good’ bad guy.  After all, who was he to judge?  He and the team fit that category too.  As for the illegal immigrants thing, well, he was pretty sure Sophie wasn’t here legally and he’d be a hypocrite of the worst sort if he condemned people he didn’t know for doing what one of his friends was doing, and something he’d done himself more than a few times in the not-too-distant past. 

“Right, the bid.”  There was silence and the brief sound of keys tapping.  “There, you’re bidding on the restaurant kitchen remodel, and I post-dated it so it looks like you put your bid in when the rest of them did.  Your company’s called Shaw Design and Construction—it’s an existing company in Boston that’s branching out nationally, and I put you on their payroll as an architect.” 

“You said this Tonio guy’s a subcontractor?  Think I can get him to work for me somehow on the kitchen thing?” 

“Man, I don’t know!  Probably.  That’s your job, not mine.  Go work or schmooze or something!”  Hardison was starting to sound exasperated.  Eliot grinned. 

“I’ll head over to the hotel after Parker gets here.  I’ll shave and change and you can let me know where I’m going from there.”  He hung up without giving Hardison a chance to respond.  That always irritated the crap out of him, so Eliot made sure to do it as often as possible. 

Eliot ducked back into Shawn’s hospital room, turning on the charm for the nurse. 

 

***

 

“She says I need to wait a week before surfing again,” Shawn complained when Eliot returned from the hall. 

“What, and you want me to change her mind?  Personally, I don’t think you need to go surfing again period,” Eliot remonstrated Shawn, waving away any further protests with a dismissive hand.  “So, how soon till he can go?” 

“The doctor needs to give his okay,” the nurse told him absentmindedly as she flipped through Shawn’s chart. 

Shawn squirmed on the bed, ready to just go and sign out AMA.  It’s not like he hadn’t done it before.  Swinging his legs out over the side of the bed, he checked the paper gown for decency and started going through the dresser drawers, looking for his clothes.  He found his trunks and his wallet in the top drawer, and the rest were empty.  “Dude!”  Shawn turned to glare at Eliot.  “Did you seriously leave my clothes on the beach?” 

“Well, it’s not like I didn’t have other things on my mind!” Eliot snapped back defensively.  

“Fail, El- Spencer, total fail,” Shawn grumbled, slamming the drawer and flinging himself back down on the bed a little too quickly, judging by the way his brain felt like it was bouncing around in his skull.  The throbbing in his head intensified exponentially and he clutched his head with a groan. 

“Parker’s on her way, I’ll tell her to stop by your place and grab some clothes for you,” Eliot muttered.  

Shawn thought about arguing that she didn’t know where he lived and wouldn’t be able to get in before he remembered what Parker did for a living.  “The office is closer.  Tell her I’ve got a change of clothes in my locker.”  Shawn gritted through clenched teeth.  His head really hurt now.  The nurse leaned over and checked his head, saying something probably intended to be soothing, but Shawn couldn’t concentrate past the pain to pay attention to what she was saying.  Maybe she was going to give him some drugs.  That would be nice.

 

***

 

“Okay, so, no sudden movements, no alcohol and no extreme sports for a while, but other than that, you’re good to go,” the doctor told Shawn cheerily. 

“You think?” Eliot muttered quietly to himself.  Parker had arrived right before the doctor, and he’d taken her aside to remind her that Shawn was broken and that ziplines and rappelling and harness rigs and freefalls and base jumping were all out of the question for the day.  She’d pouted at him—just like Shawn, in fact—but finally agreed, if reluctantly.  He wouldn’t say he trusted her to follow his rules, exactly, but he trusted her to make sure Shawn didn’t get hurt and also to hide the evidence if they broke the rules, which was pretty much the same thing.  If there was one thing Parker hated, it was getting yelled at.  Well, getting yelled at because she’d gotten caught, at least. 

Shawn took his clothes into the en suite bathroom to change and Eliot took the opportunity to slip out of the room and head back to the hotel, after double-checking with Parker that she had her earbud in and was on comms.  What would an architect wear?  Expensive work-casual, Eliot decided, and stopped in at a couple of clothing shops on his walk back to the hotel.

 

 _Two hours later…_  

“Abort!  Shit, abort!  Hardison, get out of there!”  Eliot gasped, hoping someone was listening on the other end of the comm.  He dodged a swing from Tonio, Hardison’s ‘nice guy,’ disarmed the guy with a gun coming up behind Eliot, and sidestepped the glittering flash of a knife in the hand of the guy to his left.  The plan had gone to shit—when he’d gotten to the meeting to discuss the bids, they’d already known who he was and why he was there and hadn’t been pleased about any of it. 

Eliot didn’t know how they’d found out, but the first he’d known about it was when someone had come up behind him in the middle of the meeting and flipped a garrote around his neck, and none of the other men sitting around the table had batted an eye.  He spared a brief moment to hope that Hardison had heard him and him and Nate and Sophie had evacuated the hotel room, because if they knew who Eliot was, they knew he’d been staying in the hotel just a couple of flights up. 

“Parker, they know, get out!”  Eliot grunted as someone’s fist caught him in the solar plexus, and fought to catch his breath as he forced himself to stay upright and keep defending himself even though his body just wanted to curl up and remember how to breathe.

 

***

  

 _Things got hot, we had to get out.  Keep quiet about us and they probably won’t come looking for you.  Be careful, and stop concussing yourself.  -E_  

The note was laying on his laptop's keyboard, and had been waiting for him to open it up for a round of annoyed and concussion-contra-indicated flash games.

“Well, shit,” Shawn grumbled.  There went his plans for the week.  _Now_ what was he going to do until Gus got back?

 

 

 

 

**9.**

_Six months later…_  

Eliot was finally thankful for the time he’d spent watching over Shawn Spencer back in Santa Barbara.  A four year old was nothing compared to him, so the little orphaned Jesse was in good hands.  He still didn’t know why he was always the one stuck with babysitting duty, but it wasn’t so bad.  Especially since this one wasn’t old enough to drive, thank God. 

Wyoming was glittering and peaceful under the blanket of fresh snow that had fallen last night.  It was a bitch to drive through, though, and Eliot actually found himself missing the dirty slush of Boston’s streets some days.  But while he missed the city occasionally, even the grungy snow and the streets that were more potholed than paved, he missed his team more often, with an almost constant ache in his chest.  Their takedown of Moreau had gone to shit, and they’d scattered to protect themselves.  He didn’t even know where the others were.  To protect themselves, they hadn’t told each other where they were going, so if one of them got caught, the others wouldn’t be in danger.  They’d fucked up bad in Santa Barbara, so not only was Cruz after them, but the Italian bitch was gunning for them too.  Not to mention Moreau.  

Eliot had run to Wyoming.  It was a rough trip, staying off the radar, stealing cars and switching plates and finally holing up here at this little ranch in the middle of the Rockies.  He didn’t know how long he was going to stay here, but the team had made plans to meet up at McRory’s bar back in Boston, exactly a year from the day they’d scattered.  Eliot didn’t know how safe a plan that was, and had voiced his objection that the Italian bitch already knew the bar was their HQ, but he’d been overridden by most everyone else.  Hardison had called him paranoid, and hadn’t listened when Eliot told him that being paranoid was the only reason Eliot was still alive. 

Jesse grumbled in his sleep as Eliot turned off the highway onto the ranch exit, but a quick glance over let him know that the kid was sleeping safely in his car seat.  Might have just been a dream, but Eliot turned up the heat in the old Dodge just in case it was because the kid was cold.  Jesse’s dad had hired Eliot as a ranch hand when he’d shown up out of the blue looking for work, and in these past five months he’d made his way up to foreman when old Bill had his heart attack and the doctor told him he had to slow down or just buy a plot, because he was gonna be in the ground in a few weeks if he didn’t ease off. 

Jesse’s dad—John Sheppard—was a widower, had inherited the ranch when his dad died eight or so years ago, and had been running it in the black ever since John retired roughly five years ago.  

Eliot supposed he shouldn’t call Jesse an orphan, not even in his head, because his dad wasn’t dead, and it’d be Eliot’s bad luck that Someone was listening in and made it true.  John had been called back up and was over in Afghanistan. He'd left Jesse with Eliot, since he said he trusted him and that they were practically family after five months of the kind of hard work it took to run a ranch.  Eliot was shocked that John hadn’t sent Jesse to live with Laura’s parents, but he’d said okay when he found out that the kid didn’t really have any family other than John.  Laura’s parents were estranged, seeing as they blamed John for their daughter’s death, so they didn’t want anything to do with Jesse; John's parents were both dead.  Laura and John had both been only children (or at least Eliot assumed so, since John never really talked about his family to him other than to tell him that he’d inherited the ranch), so there weren’t even any aunts or uncles to call on. 

So now Eliot had a kid who called him Uncle Tommy.  Eliot had nixed Uncle Tom the first time it’d come out of the kid’s mouth, not even daring to imagine the shit he’d get from Hardison.  Thomas Sawyer was who he was now, Hardison’s idea of a joke he supposed, the ‘in case of emergencies’ ID in the go-bag packet the hacker had given each of them a year or so back.  John had left for Afghanistan last week, but Jesse had stopped asking for his dad after the first few days.  It hurt Eliot a little that the kid was so adaptable, but at least he didn’t think his dad was dead. 

Eliot pulled up in front of the house, put the truck in park, and leaned over to ruffle Jesse’s hair.  “Hey, J.J.,” he said softly, “C’mon, wake up.  We’re home.”  Jesse squeezed his eyes shut and scrunched down in his seat.  “Okay, buddy, you don’t have to get up,” Eliot laughed softly.  He got out of the truck and went around to Jesse’s side, opening the door and unbuckling the kid from his car seat to carry the limp four year old into the house and up to his bedroom, leaving the groceries in the bed of the truck to get later.  Checking the door and each of the rooms for signs of intruders as he walked through the house was still second nature, and not a thing Eliot had had to hide around John, a fellow graduate from the military’s school of ‘learn or die.’  John hadn’t asked about Eliot’s past, for which he was grateful, but he was sure John had made a few informed guesses about why Eliot didn’t sleep well at night and why he picked fights at the bar in town and what made him always check every room when he entered the house.  Because John did all those same things, though he got in fewer bar fights the longer Eliot had been there.  So did Eliot, now that Jesse was his responsibility. 

Eliot put Jesse down gently in his bed, easing the tiny shoes off his equally tiny feet and wriggling the kid’s limp arms out of the small jacket.  That was probably good enough.  Eliot knew by now that if he woke Jesse up to get him into his pajamas, the kid wouldn’t go back to sleep till at least midnight, and then he'd be cranky as Nate in rehab the next morning.  One night in his clothes wouldn’t hurt the kid.  Eliot tucked the blanket up over Jesse and left the room, leaving the door open a crack to let the hall light in. 

Packing the groceries in from the truck, Eliot haphazardly sorted them into the fridge, freezer and pantry and called it good.  He crashed on the couch, feeling as tired as Jesse had looked.  It was a long drive to the city and back, and he’d made it worth their while by hitting up both Costco and Wal-Mart and getting everything he thought they could possibly need for the next month or two.  Tomorrow he’d go out to the barn and see if the tractor was still acting up and what he could do about it and maybe set Brad Heiner, the relatively new ranch hand John had hired to replace Eliot when Eliot took over Bill’s job, to checking the fence line and see if this new snow had pulled down any of the wire, and check on the snow fences to see if they were holding.  

At least Eliot was staying in the house now, and not the bunk house, so he only had to go up the stairs to get to the bed in the spare room, as opposed to trekking down to the bunk house through this damned powder.  John had moved him up here when he’d promoted him to foreman, leaving Bill in the foreman’s cottage attached to the bunkhouse.  It was one thing to take a man’s job, quite another to take the house that he’d lived in for the past thirty-plus years.  Luckily, John felt the same way, and had declared that Bill was staying in the foreman’s cottage till he croaked or moved to some ‘pansy-ass retirement village.’  John’s words, not Eliot’s, though they’d made Bill laugh.  

Eliot forced himself off the couch with a grunt and headed up the stairs to fall into bed and a well-earned sleep.

 

 

 

 _Santa Barbara, still six months later…_  

Shawn fingered the scar on his forehead as he thought.  After six months, it had faded to a little white line that he could only see in the mirror if he was actively looking for it, but his fingers always found it without error.  “The killer hasn’t fled to Boston, Shawn, so don’t even say it,” Gus said flatly, eyeing him.  

Shawn dropped his hand to his lap and blinked at Gus, pulled from his thoughts.  “What?  Why would he have fled to Boston?” 

Gus sighed.  “I said he _didn’t_ flee to Boston, Shawn.  _No one_ flees to Boston from Santa Barbara.  They flee to Mexico.” 

“Stop saying flee.” 

“Flee.” 

Shawn rolled his eyes.  “I wasn’t going to say he _ran_ to Boston, Gus.” 

“That’s what you always say when you start playing with that scar.”  Gus rolled his eyes back at Shawn. 

“I do not, Gus.” 

“You do so, Shawn.  You touch that scar and then always come up with some wild and crazy reason why we should go to Boston so you can look him up because you’re in town on business.  And I’m not so sure that you didn’t make that guy up in the first place,” Gus added, his eyes sliding away from Shawn’s as he accused his best friend of over thirty years of lying.  That stung, just a little. 

“You talked to him on the phone,” Shawn pointed out, not hurt enough by the accusation to let it show. 

“It could have been anyone that I talked to on the phone, Shawn.  I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but, well, I don’t believe you.  He disappeared off the face of the earth before I got back from my work retreat.  Normal, _real_ people don’t disappear into thin air like that.”  Gus leveled a look at Shawn like he was trying to see inside Shawn’s head.  Shawn found it only slightly disconcerting when he did that.  It wasn’t like Gus could _actually_ read his mind. 

“Whatever.  Like I was _gonna_ say, before you took the Tangent Train, are we sure this guy’s the killer?  I mean, he still lives with his mom.”  Shawn changed the subject.  He was really tired of going over and over the same ground with Gus in regards to that one week. 

“He probably has a lot of rage bottled up inside because of that,” Gus argued. 

“He collects stamps, Gus.” 

“Philately doesn’t preclude murder, Shawn.” 

It was for Gus’s own good.  If Gus knew Shawn understood him perfectly when he used the big words, he’d never stop his friend from sounding like a walking dictionary.  And friends don’t let friends speak Webster.  “No one’s talking about fiddles here, Gus.  Stop being such a double chocolate chip muffin-head.  I’m just saying, maybe we should look at Steve the Pirate.” 

“You mean Stephan, the deckhand who worked on the victim’s yacht?” Gus asked. 

“That’s what I said.” Shawn looked at Gus blankly. 

“One, Lassiter said that Stephan’s alibi checked out, and two, Harold was caught on camera running from the scene of the crime.”  Gus ticked off his points on his fingers. 

“Gus-Gus,” Shawn started. 

“I’m never letting you watch Cinderella again,” Gus interrupted, glowering at him. 

“Gus, when was the last time Lassy was right about who did it?” Shawn asked with a put-upon look. 

“Last case, when he caught the guy you said was innocent disposing of the second body.” Gus said smugly. 

“You’re never gonna drop that, are you?” Shawn sighed. 

“Nope,” Gus smirked at him. 

“I was technically right though, because he wasn’t the murderer, just a… thingy.  What’s it called?”  The word was on the tip of his tongue, and he waved his hand around in the air like it would help him remember. 

“Accomplice after the fact?” Gus supplied. 

“That,” Shawn agreed. 

“Whatever.  Let’s go talk to Steve the- Stephan the deckhand, then.” 

“I knew you’d see it my way, buddy,” Shawn grinned and followed Gus out the office door to the Blueberry.

 

 

 _Wyoming, the next day…_  

Eliot was under the tractor, looking for the oil leak he knew was there.  Jesse was sitting beside the toolbox and playing with a smaller version of the tractor Eliot was mentally cursing, making motor sounds.  “Bbbbbbroawrbbb- _clunk_ -brrrrbbrawrb.”  It kinda sounded like the tractor on a bad day, including the _clunk_ , but Eliot doubted that that sound had come from the kid.  

He rolled out from under the tractor and had Jesse shielded behind him before he even knew what he’d done, a ridiculously large pipe wrench gripped like a weapon in his right hand.  The clunk was from Brad, who was over by the work bench and looking for something in the mess.  Jesse giggled at Eliot’s reaction, and he flushed at the sound, dropping the wrench back into the toolbox.  Brad looked over at the sound.  “Find the leak?” 

“Not yet.  What're you looking for?”  Eliot glanced down, raising an eyebrow at Jesse, who was rolling around on the dirt floor in what he supposed was an imitation of himself. 

“Staples for the gun.  One of the wires on the west fence got pulled down by the snow for a good hundred yards or so, and I’ve run out of staples,” Brad told him, continuing his search of the cluttered work bench.  

“Me and the kid can go fix it if you’ll take a look at the tractor.  I don’t know how I keep missing the leak, so maybe fresh eyes would help. And anyway, I’ve got some leftover wire staples in the Dodge,” Eliot volunteered. 

“Fence, fence, fence,” Jesse started chanting, and Brad laughed.  

“Sure,” Brad agreed easily, shucking his jacket now that he was going to be staying in the heated barn, and Eliot had another mental flash of Brad-the-Stripper; something that’d been popping up in his head disturbingly often since John had hired the guy.  Eliot forced his eyes off the broad expanse of sweat-soaked flannel that clung to Brad’s muscled back like it had something to prove and wondered what the hell was wrong with him, for the thousandth time.  Brad was a man.  Men weren’t sexy.  _Flannel_ wasn’t sexy.  Neither were farm hands who looked like an advertisement for rough trade.  

What.  The.  _Hell_?  

Eliot hot-footed it out of the barn, away from his disturbing thoughts, with Jesse frisking at his heels like a boisterous puppy.

 

 

 

 _California, still one day later…_  

Shawn lounged on Jules’s desk in the bullpen and she worked around him with an aura of palpable resignation and mild amusement.  Shawn was waiting for the giddy thrill of accomplishment that usually filled him when he’d solved a case and proved Lassy wrong all at the same time.  But his glee was missing, and it had been missing for a while.  Baiting Lassy wasn’t even as much fun as it used to be.  Maybe it was time to move on.  He’d had over six years at this job now, after all.  Maybe it was time to travel again.  Mexico was always nice in the winter.  Or he could go find some snow and see if he still remembered how to board.  It was definitely easier than skiing, from what he remembered of that Whistler trip with Gus.  Why he’d let Gus talk him into skiing when he actually knew how to snowboard, he still didn’t know.

 

 

 

 _Seven months after the Santa Barbara clusterfuck…_  

“How the hell did you find me?” Eliot had been astonished to find Hardison on the front porch of the ranch house that morning, but had let him in anyway.  Had let him in even though he looked like an extra who’d barely escaped from the set of _Hackers_ with his life, and without returning his wardrobe.  Let him in even though it was barely six in the morning and Eliot had a shit-ton of work to do that day, because the squeeze in his chest on seeing Hardison had spelled family. 

“I put electronic trackers in the emergency IDs I gave you guys,” Hardison explained absentmindedly, setting up his laptop on the kitchen table.  “Don’t worry, I’m the only one that can access them,” he cut over Eliot’s growl of how that wasn’t very goddamned safe if they were trying to stay hidden.  “I—dude.” He stopped talking, the bewilderment in his voice about equal to Eliot’s that morning when he found the hacker on the porch.  

Jesse had skidded around the corner into the kitchen, still in his train and rocket-ship footie pajamas, and immediately clung to Eliot’s leg, peeking around Eliot at the stranger in the kitchen.  “Uncle Tommy, Uncle Tommy,” he hissed in his version of a whisper—which was, coincidentally, louder than his normal speaking voice, “Who’s that?” 

“Uncle Tommy?” Hardison’s face struggled between amusement and surprise.  “Since when have you had a nephew?” 

“Since nine years ago.  This one, since six months ago.  What’s up, Hardison?  I thought we weren’t meeting for another five months.”  He leaned down to swing Jesse up into the air, surprising a squeal out of the kid.  “That’s Hardison, we’ve known each other for forever.  He’s my brother,” he explained to Jesse.  Hardison stared at his computer for a moment, like he was trying to hide the non-expression on his face.  Whatever.  Hardison was a part of his surrogate family, whether he liked it or not. 

Jesse, God bless him, didn’t even glance between their wildly differing skin colors before busting out with, “Uncle Har-ison, you wan’ fruit loops for breffuss?” 

“Sure,” Hardison managed, obviously thrown for a loop by the knowledge Eliot had blood-ties, and just as obviously charmed by Jesse, and the kid wriggled out of Eliot’s arms to run over to the counter and start dumping the fruit loops into three of the plastic bowls he found in the bottom cabinets.  

“So what’re you here for?” Eliot asked again, keeping a wary eye on Jesse as he fumbled with the milk carton. 

“It’s about that Shawn Spencer guy.  I flagged him when we worked with him, and a couple of days ago an APB went out on him—he’s listed as a Missing Person now.  He’s just dropped off the radar.  I think it’s possible Cruz or Moreau or that Italian bitch might have found out he was working with us and snagged him,” Hardison explained, starting to type something into his laptop. 

Eliot froze.  For a second, it felt like his heart stopped beating.  “Mother _fuck_ ,” he breathed, then automatically glanced over to make sure Jesse was still safely humming to himself on the other side of the kitchen as he spilled milk into the three bowls, too preoccupied to have heard Eliot cuss.  “How long’s he been missing for?” 

“He disappeared just under a month ago, but he’s only been officially missing for the past week.  Either someone was dragging their ass on reporting him missing, or they thought they knew where he was.  The person who first reported him missing was a Burton Guster, and the person who filed the missing persons report was Henry Spencer, who I’m guessing is his dad,” Hardison said, reading names off his laptop.  Eliot leaned over Hardison’s shoulder to see what he was looking at, and was startled by the sight of an FBI database.  

“You hacked into the FBI from here?” he hissed angrily.  

“Don’t worry, they can’t track it,” Hardison soothed.  Hardison whipped the laptop out of the way as Jesse sloshed the bowls of cereal onto the table, just barely saving the computer from an inglorious death by drowning in milk and soggy fruit loops.  He set it safely out of the way and dug into his cereal with a grin at Jesse. 

“Thanks, buddy,” Eliot ruffled Jesse’s hair absentmindedly and watched him clamber up to kneel on one of the chairs and start shoveling his fruit loops into his mouth.  “So, what are we gonna do about it?  What do you want me to do?  Jesse’s dad is overseas-” 

“In ‘La- ‘Ganstan,” Jesse interrupted him proudly. 

“I can’t take a four year old on a manhunt,” Eliot hissed at Hardison. 

“I know,” Hardison hissed back.  Jesse was watching them intently with narrowed eyes.  “Can’t you leave him with someone?” 

Eliot knew the look growing on Jesse’s face—it was the prelude to a tantrum.  “No.  I can’t.”  God, what a dilemma.  Shawn taken, and Jesse with no one else to look after him.  Bill was too old and sick to chase around after a four year old, and Brad was doing his job as well as most of Eliot’s now that Eliot had Jesse to keep track of.  He had no clue how John had ever managed to get so much done.  But Eliot was the retrieval expert—if anyone could find Shawn, it’d be him.  “Hey, buddy,” he tried to distract Jesse from the coming tantrum, “Want to go get dressed?  We can show Uncle Hardison the ranch.” 

Jesse’s face cleared, and he jumped down from his chair to run up the stairs.  Once the kid was safely out of earshot, Eliot turned back to Hardison.  “I don’t know what I can do to help, man.  I can’t put Jesse in danger, and there really is no one else to watch him.” 

Hardison sighed, and pulled out a cheap burner phone.  “I don’t know what to say, man.  Can you at least call this Burton guy and find out what he knows?  You’ve talked to him before, right?” 

Eliot took the phone and shook his head.  “I’ll try, man, but I can’t promise anything.”  He dialed the number Hardison gave him, and thanked whoever was listening that the ranch had cell service.  Harder to track a burn phone that Hardison had had his hands on than a landline, and Eliot really didn’t want anyone showing up at the ranch looking for them.  

After two rings, someone picked up with a cautious “Hello?” 

“This is El- Spencer Chappell.  I just found out about Shawn going missing—is there anything you can tell me?” He caught himself after the first syllable of his name, cursing internally about letting even that much slip.  

“Honestly?  I’d hoped he was with you, _El_ Spencer Chappell,” Burton sighed, managing to sound simultaneously weary and suspicious though the tinny speaker on the burn phone. 

“Why would he be with me?” Eliot asked in bewilderment. 

“Because he kept thinking about going to Boston and looking you up after you disappeared into thin air, that’s why,” Shawn’s friend snapped. 

“Wait, what?”  Eliot was confused, but knew he needed to focus, here.  “Never mind.  Seriously, what can you tell me?  All I know is that he disappeared three weeks ago and was reported as a missing person last week.  Was anyone following him before that?  Did he seem paranoid?  Did you see anything suspicious?” 

“You sound like Detective Lassiter and Shawn’s dad,” Burton grumbled.  “No, I didn’t see anyone or anything suspicious, and he wasn’t anymore paranoid than usual, what with the whole ‘marked for death by Yin’ thing.” 

“Marked for death?”  Eliot’s heart stuttered again.  Dammit.  Maybe he should get that looked at.  He sank down onto the couch. 

“Old news, don’t worry about it.  It’s not Yin, there’s no clues, and he wouldn’t just grab Shawn without playing games.  The only thing I noticed before he disappeared was that the usual things didn’t seem to be as fun for him anymore.  He’d even stopped mocking Lassiter when we solved his cases for him.  And on the day he left, the Psych office was locked and there was a magic 8-ball on the stoop with a note under it that said ‘closed for psychic repairs, please consult my little friend.’” 

“That doesn’t make sense,” Eliot commented, sidetracked. 

“Shawn rarely does.”  Burton sighed.  “Honestly?  I think he ran again.  I suppose six years at one job in one place was the limit,” Burton sounded resigned.  “I’ll probably get a really ugly postcard in the mail from Mexico or Brazil or Taiwan in a few months, with a couple words on the back about how he knows I wish I was there.  It’s pretty much par for the course.” 

“What about his bike?  Did he take his Norton?” Eliot asked, feeling like he was grasping at straws. 

“Either that or he stashed it in storage somewhere I can’t find or never knew about.  He probably headed down to Mexico first, that’s where he always fled to back in high school,” the man sounded like he’d recited this just a few times already. 

“Do the cops have any leads?” 

“No.” 

“Thanks, Burton,” Eliot said, resigned. 

“Gus,” Shawn’s friend interrupted him. 

“Thanks Gus,” Eliot repeated, almost amused at the correction. 

“Wait!” Eliot put the phone back to his ear.  “Just… You might not be who I think you are, and if you aren’t I’m sorry for sounding crazy, but if you are, just…  Just make sure he’s not in trouble?  Okay?” 

“Okay,” Eliot agreed grimly and hung up.  Apparently Google had trumped Hardison after all.  Either that, or Gus was getting desperate.  

He gave Hardison the Cliff’s Notes summary of the conversation back in the kitchen, giving over the phone for Hardison to dispose of.  “So, he might have just gone walkabout or something,” Hardison muttered to himself, and Eliot made a mental note to mock Crocodile Dundee later.  

“But we should still find him, just in case it was Moreau or Cruz behind it,” Eliot added after Hardison hadn’t said anything for a while. 

“We?”  Hardison looked up at him.  “So you’re in now?” 

“Yeah,” Eliot sighed.  “I can keep Jesse safe.  I just hope I’ve got on Kevlar when John finds out.”

 

 

 

 

 **10.**  

 _Two days later…_  

30,000 feet in the air, Eliot was struck by a thought.  “Hardison.  _Hardison.  Alec_ ,” he hissed, trying to get the hacker’s attention without waking Jesse.  Hardison looked around at the last one and pulled off his headphones.  

“What?” he whispered back warily, fully aware now, of the wrath of a Jesse woken from a nap before he was ready.  That had been an… _interesting_ hour yesterday. 

“Did you check his credit card activity?”  He’d remembered Shawn paying at the surf shop with an American Express. 

“ _No_ , El- Tom, I’m totally incompetent and didn’t check his credit card activity,” Hardison whispered scornfully. 

“So…  That means you did, right?”  Eliot was pretty sure he’d translated the sarcasm correctly, but sometimes Hardison forgot the simple things in favor of the more complicated—and challenging—ones. 

“Yes, I checked.  There’s no credit cards under his name at all,” Hardison replied with an eye roll. 

Eliot thought back, trying to remember as much as he could about that day in the shop.  Most of it had been overshadowed by the hospital visit later the same day, but when he concentrated, he remembered that Shawn hadn’t signed his own name on the credit slip.  It’d been loopy and squiggly, with a lot of flourishes, but he remembered thinking the first letter looked like a B, before dismissing it as irrelevant.  “Check Gus’s—Burton Guster’s—cards.  It hasn’t been a full month, so he wouldn’t have gotten the statement yet if Shawn’s been using one of them, but he used Gus’s AmEx to buy the surfing stuff that day he got his concussion.” 

Hardison blinked at him for a moment, then hunched over his computer and started tapping like crazy at the keys.  “Thank God there’s WiFi on planes nowadays,” Eliot heard him muttering to himself, and then Hardison hissed over his shoulder at Eliot, “You couldn’t have thought of this _before_ we boarded the plane?”  

“You found him?”  Eliot asked, slightly too loudly, and relaxed back into his seat, feeling muscles easing in his back that he hadn’t known until now had been strung tighter than an E-string ever since he’d found out Shawn was missing. 

“I found him,” Hardison confirmed with a smug whisper and a slightly terrified glance at Jesse, who’d started shifting in his sleep after Eliot’s less than quiet question.  “Luckily we’re connecting in Dallas/Fort Worth; we’ll be able to change our flight.” 

“Where is he?” 

“South Dakota.” 

Eliot stifled the slightly hysterical laugh that was trying to escape his chest.  So fucking close.  Shawn had been in the next state over the whole time.  He decided, however, to wait to call Gus until he had his hands on Shawn.  Preferably around his skinny little neck.  Because if the guy had disappeared once, he could do it again.  And it might just be some thief who’d lifted Gus’s card or got the number online.  But when he got his hands on Shawn, he’d… he was gonna… do _something_.  Something bad.  He’d figure it out as he went along.  Goddamn him, for making Eliot worry like this.  Eliot didn’t _do_ worry.

 

***

 

Shawn skidded to a stop, catching his assorted 12- through 15-year-old students with a spray of snow.  Yup, he still had it.  He’d been teaching the beginning snowboarders at this mom-and-pop ski school for the past two weeks, hired on nothing more than a quick demonstration and a slightly harrowing run down the diamond trail.  He was pretty sure he’d spelled his own name wrong on the W2s, (he’d been both stoned and drunk at the time) but they paid in cash at the end of every lesson, and that was good enough for him. 

“Shane!” Elise trotted up, remarkably graceful in her ski boots.  Shawn guessed that meant him when she stopped next to him and grabbed his elbow to make him look down and meet her eyes.  

He raised his eyebrows at her.  “What’s up?”  Too much effort to correct her, since apparently he’d been Shane for two weeks and hadn’t noticed.  If she hadn’t been married to Dan with one of the cutest two year old girls in existence, he would have totally gone for that.  Or Dan.  Competence and confidence combined were damn sexy, and they both had both in spades.  “There are some people looking for you up at the lodge.  Cutest gay couple I’ve seen in a while, and their son is adorable.  I think they want to talk about private lessons for him.  He’s only four, but I think you’d get along great,” she grinned cheekily at him, and he mock-pushed her. 

“Hey, I resemble that remark,” he Foghorn Leghorned at her and grinned smugly when she laughed, while the teenagers looked on with studied boredom.  God, he was getting old.  Who didn’t know Looney Tunes?  Seriously.  Kids today.  He hid a wince when he realized he was starting to think like Henry sounded.  _Pineapple in a pomegranate tree,_ please _don’t let me grow up to be my dad_ , he prayed silently. 

“Go on, talk to them, I’ll take over your class.  Don’t worry, your fee will be the same, especially since you’re talking with prospective clients,” she smiled and him and waved him off down the slope.  He blinked as she tossed her board down on the snow and stepped into the bindings.  How had he missed the fact she’d brought her board?  With a little hop to turn his board, he slid off down the bunny slope to the little lodge Elise and Dan ran their school and small ski-resort from.  Maybe he should cut back a little on the pot and alcohol, if even his mostly-sober days were starting to get fuzzy.  Then again, it was kinda nice being on the normal part of the observational acuity range for a change.  He was pretty sure that was the right name for it, anyway. 

He unfastened his boots from his board, leaning it up against the railing of the lodge porch.  He was still stamping the snow off of his boots on the porch when someone slammed out through the screen door and had him pinned up against the wall next to the door quickly enough that he had no clue how he’d gotten there.  There was a bruisingly tight grip on his shoulders, and he stared into a pair of kinda familiar and slightly wild eyes for a brief second before he was being kissed, and pretty damn thoroughly, at that.  Stubble scratched across his own; the full lips moving firmly against his and the slick tongue tracing the inside of his lips were working together to melt his internal organs into silly putty.  His skin burned wherever their bodies were pressed together (so pretty much his entire front was on fire), regardless of the multiple layers of clothing between everything but the lips on his and the hand that had slid around to rest on the nape of his neck.  

Shawn responded enthusiastically, because, hey, he was always up for making out.  Even when he was slightly bewildered as to _why_ he was making out.  Or who with.  Then the dude pulled back and punched him in the stomach, and Shawn recognized the hair even as he curled around the fist in his gut.  “Hey, El,” he wheezed, “long time no see.” 

“Don’t you ever, _ever_ , fucking do that to me again,” Eliot muttered, pulling Shawn into a tight hug.  Which totally wasn’t helping Shawn get his breath back.  

He shoved Eliot off him and gasped painfully for a second or five before he caught his breath.  “What, disappear off the face of the earth and not call or write or even fucking text?” Shawn snapped at him.  “Why does _that_ sound so familiar?” 

Eliot grabbed Shawn by the shoulders again and shook him roughly, bruising Shawn’s back against the wall and ignoring Shawn’s attempts to get away with the casual ease of someone who manhandled people for a living.  “I disappeared because _people were trying to kill me_ , Shawn!  The same people I thought had killed _you_ when you dropped off the radar!  Do you know you’re listed as a missing person back in California?” 

Shawn stopped struggling to get free.  “Um, I’m guessing Gus hasn’t gotten my postcard yet?”  He ventured weakly.  And then something finally percolated through his chemical-addled brain. “Hey!  You kissed me!” he accused, pointing at Eliot.  

Eliot’s eyes widened fractionally and his grasp on Shawn’s shoulders eased, almost as if he hadn’t known he’d kissed Shawn until right then.  Eliot leaned closer, staring into Shawn’s eyes.  Shawn thought for a second that they were having a ‘moment’, or that Eliot was going to kiss him again, which was something Shawn was perfectly okay with.  But then Eliot released one of his shoulders to hold up a finger in front of Shawn’s face, moving it back and forth to see if Shawn followed it with his eyes.  Which he did.  “Are you stoned?  Or just concussed again?”  Eliot asked pointedly. 

“Um,” Shawn blinked at him.  Eliot growled.  He should really not be finding that sexy right now.  But hey, Eliot had just kissed him.  So maybe he should be.  Eliot glared at him, like it was _Shawn’s_ fault Eliot had kissed him, before stomping back into the lodge lobby.  Shawn was pretty sure that if it there’d been a proper door rather than automated glass sliding doors, there would have been some serious slamming going on.  He watched Eliot through the glass door and saw a little kid run up to him.  Eliot swung him up and put him on his shoulders, and the six feet plus of chocolaty goodness that Shawn remembered meeting before—the dude Gus wanted to be when he grew up—patted his arm… comfortingly?  Shit, what if Eliot had told Elise the truth?  Were he and Hardison together?  That would explain a lot.  Though he was pretty sure he’d remember a kid, even in his current state, and he didn’t.  Was he newly adopted?  “Great fucking timing, Shawn,” he muttered to himself.  He figured that if they were staying, they’d probably rent one of the cabins, or else they’d find him again later if they needed to, so Shawn stomped off the porch to go sober up.  He needed all the wits at his disposal that he could get if he was going to have to deal with Eliot later; that is, if they didn’t just disappear into thin air.  Again.

 

 

 _Four cups of coffee and most of a long-distance phone call later…_  

“Why do you keep calling him the dude I want to be when I grow up?” 

“Because you totally do, Gus, just trust me on this.” 

“Fine.  You want to be Matt Passmore’s character on The Glades when _you_ grow up, _Shawn_.” 

“You know, man, that wounds me.  Really wounds me.  You know I don’t want to be a cop when I grow up.  Not even a badass like Jim Longworth.  Though I’d totally rather work with him than Lassy.  Mmmm.  Did you know that Passmore’s actually Australian?” 

“Point made, Shawn, point made.  And also?  You so do.” 

“Gus?  Gus!  …You know I hate it when you hang up after having the last word.  …Gus?” 

Shawn hung up after talking to the dial tone got old.  That had _totally_ helped him with his Eliot Dilemma.  Except for not.

 

 

 _No cups of coffee and approximately 30 seconds into a long-distance phone call later…_  

“You’re _where?!_ ” John growled into the phone.  Eliot manfully refrained from pulling the phone away from his ear. 

“South Dakota,” Eliot repeated, grimacing. 

“And you needed to take him to Texas first, why, exactly?” 

“How did you…” Eliot trailed off. 

“Are you kidding?  The kid’s got Sheppard’s genes, _of course_ we put a sub-” another voice started muttering into Eliot‘s ear. 

Eliot realized he was on speaker when John cut over the other voice, “I have ways.  Answer the fucking question, Tom.  Why are you dragging my son all around the country after you?  Not to mention, who the hell is looking after my fucking ranch while you’re in god damned _South Dakota_?  Give me one good reason not to come after you right this fucking second.” 

“A friend got …lost.” Eliot briefly searched for the right word.  “I had to go—come—find him, before someone else did.” 

“If there’s even one fucking scratch on Jesse, Tom, you’re a dead man.  Believe me when I say they’ll _never_ fucking find the pieces.”  Eliot caught a muttered “…space gate…” from the second voice and the blaring of what sounded like an air raid siren before John started talking again.  “I’ve gotta go, there’s a… situation.  This isn’t over.” John hung up. 

Eliot put his cell phone down on the cabin’s kitchen table and eyed it.  “Is there a tracker or a bug or something on that?” he asked Hardison warily.  How the hell had John kept tabs on them like that?  And how the _fuck_ had John gotten the number?  It was a new burn phone Hardison had bought in the terminal after they landed in South Dakota— _today—_ to replace the one Eliot had called Gus with two days ago, which Hardison had subsequently destroyed.  

Hardison was eyeing the phone with the same expression Eliot could feel on his own face.  “Fuck, man.  Maybe I should join up if that’s stuff the military can do now.  I’ve got no _clue_ how he tracked us or called it.”  He tapped at his keyboard for a few seconds, then added, “I can’t even trace where he called from.”  Hardison had been the one to warily answer the phone when it had started ringing, and whatever John had said to him had obviously shaken the man.  Luckily Jesse had been absorbed by the cabin’s TV for the past half hour, and hadn’t learned any new words for his rapidly expanding vocabulary—John’s side of the conversation had been pretty loud.

 

_An undisclosed location, possibly somewhere in the Pacific Ocean…_  

“McKay,” full bird Colonel (it was still hard to believe that someone had promoted him again) John Sheppard started and paused, trying to figure out what, exactly, he wanted to ask his friend to do, but Dr. M. ( _Meredith!_ ) Rodney McKay cut him off with a wave of his hand. 

“Already on it.”  The scientist tapped at his touch screen for a couple seconds before looking up to fix John with a glare.  “You should probably, you know, go do your _job_ or whatever and make sure we don’t all die horribly because I’m researching the guy you left your son with after only knowing him for _five months_ instead of stopping whatever’s trying to kill us _today_.”  

John bit back a grin and headed for the ‘gate room at a jog.  McKay was a good friend. 

 

 

 _South Dakota, five hours later…_

There was still no sign of Shawn.  A couple of smiles aimed at the girl behind the desk at the lodge had gotten Eliot the number of the cabin Shawn was staying in, though.  Eliot was contemplating maybe heading over there and just busting down the door to have it out with him.  They needed to talk about Shawn’s tendency to drop off the radar, and possibly about whatever the hell had happened when Eliot had first caught sight of him back at the lodge—Eliot had no idea why he’d… done that, and he wanted to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.  But when he opened the cabin door on his way out to have his little _talk_ with Shawn, he was a little sidetracked by the sight of John Sheppard in full combat gear aiming a P-90 right between Eliot’s eyes.  Just a _little_ sidetracked. 

Eliot raised his arms as slowly and unthreateningly as he could and took a step back into the cabin.  “Hey, John.”  His voice didn’t crack, and he was pretty proud of that.  

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hardison automatically step in front of Jesse, holding the kid behind him to protect him if bullets started flying, and Eliot felt a spasm of pride in his chest at the hacker’s—his brother’s unthinking response to a unknown threat.  John stepped into the cabin and lowered his P-90, letting it hang from the strap attached to his tac vest and resting his forearms on the butt of the gun in the closest he could get to casually crossing his arms across his chest.  Eliot remembered that position.  The tac vest made crossing your arms a little impossible.  Eliot didn’t lower his hands when John lowered his weapon, though, because three more people filed into the cabin, dressed for combat—just like John—sweeping the room with their weapons (safeties green on the P-90s, Eliot noted thankfully, though he couldn’t tell whether the safety was on or not on the unfamiliar gun the big guy in the leather was wielding) before lowering their weapons.  The two men and the woman moved like soldiers, but when they lowered their weapons they relaxed completely, rather than slipping into the At Ease stance.  So, not zoomies like John, then.  Or any other branch of the American military at all, for that matter. 

“Hey, Tom,” John responded easily, but then his eyes narrowed and his smirk turned cold.  “Or is it _Eliot_?” 

 

 

 

 **11.**  

Eliot lowered his hands to his side, telegraphing his movements and carefully keeping his hands out of his pockets.  There weren’t any guns trained on him now, but he knew that wouldn’t last very damn long if he made any sudden movements or did anything that could be even remotely misconstrued as reaching for a weapon.  “It’s cool, Hardison,” he said without lowering his voice or taking his eyes off John.  “You can let Jesse go now.  This is his dad; he won’t hurt him.” 

Hardison muttered something Eliot didn’t catch, but then Jesse was flying past him and flinging himself on his dad.  John caught him with a grunt and hastily rearranged him so he wasn’t clinging to the P-90 strapped to John’s chest any longer, unclipping the gun from his tac vest and passing it off to the big guy directly behind him.  _“Daddy!  Daddy!  Uncle Ernon!  Uncle Kay!  Auntie ‘La!  You’re here, you’re here, you’re HERE!”_  Jesse screeched at a decibel that Eliot hadn’t ever heard come out of anything other than a high-powered speaker before.  “You gonna go play in’a snow wi’ me?!”  

There was a faint sound from the front porch, followed by a “Holy shit,” that definitely hadn’t come from inside the cabin. 

Eliot caught a glimpse of Shawn’s face around the big guy’s shoulder for only an instant.  Then there was a flash of red light and the big guy was shrugging in response to John’s glare and Eliot was kneeling beside where Shawn was sprawled out on the porch without remembering how he’d got from point A to point B, checking for a pulse on Shawn’s neck with fingers buzzing so hard from adrenaline that he couldn’t tell if he was feeling Shawn’s heartbeat or his own.

 

***

 

“I _swear_ , El, if you let Parker tase me _again_ , I’m gonna…”  Shawn heard himself talking before he even realized he was awake, and trailed off after he opened his eyes.  “…do …something,” he finished half-heartedly, staring up at the people glaring down at him.  “ _Seriously_?”  Was he hallucinating, or were there really paratroopers in Eliot’s cabin?  Maybe—probably—he was still stoned.  “Please don’t tell me you’re here to kill me,” he muttered to himself, “because I really don’t want to hear the ‘I told you so’s.”  

“You’d be dead already and couldn’t hear them, anyway,” the one with the… hair… pointed out after a moment.  He was gonna have to think of a better description, though, because more than one of them had some pretty impressive hair going on; for instance, there was the big dude with dreads down to the middle of his back—dreads that actually looked nice, and not the un-cared-for clumps they sometimes ended up as—as well as the chick with the silky multitude of pinned-up braids that looked like a non-creepy parallel of Medusa’s snakes.  So hair guy wasn’t the only one of them with impressive hair.  But words were kind of failing him at the moment when it came to describing it.  That hair was what his hair wanted to grow up to be—at least in the mornings right after he’d rolled out of bed after some really energetic morning sex.  

The past day—hell, the past month or so—was a little blurry, possibly due to either Shawn’s morning vodka habit (fortification for spending the day with teenagers), or Shawn’s regular after-lesson wind down smoke (the pot helped him forget about the teenagers, among other things), or it might even stem from being tased ( _again_ ) just a few minutes ago.  Or a cumulative combination of all three.  Shawn wasn’t really sure how he ended up lying on Eliot’s cabin’s porch ringed by staring paratroopers hovering over him, but he figured it most likely wouldn’t have made sense regardless of how sober or un-tased he was.  That sort of thing never made sense—or so he assumed.  It wasn’t like Shawn had ever been in this situation before, after all.  

He wondered how long he’d been out of it, but that wasn’t a conversation he felt like having right now, not when there were other, more interesting things around to talk about—for instance, paratroopers in Eliot’s cabin.  He pushed himself up to a sitting position, holding his head in his hands, and finally noticed Eliot kneeling beside him.  Dear Pineapple in the Sky, he hoped whatever was fucking up his observational skills would wear off soon—dude was practically sitting on him.  And, kinda grey, he noted.  Maybe it was the porch lights—not exactly anyone’s best lighting.  Shawn noticed Eliot noticing Shawn noticing him, and then Shawn noticed Eliot clenching his teeth behind lips pressed so tight together they were a bloodless white.  Huffing out a breath, Eliot was on his feet and inside the cabin before Shawn had done more than open his mouth, before he’d even figured out what ill-advised words were going to spill out of his brain for public consumption.  Running away before Shawn even said something—that boded _really_ well for Shawn, except for how it didn’t. 

The big dude with the dreadlocks yanked Shawn to his feet like it cost him as much effort as it did Shawn to pick up a magazine.  “Whoa.  Headrush,” he muttered to himself, swaying woozily.  The chick inserted herself under Shawn’s arm as he staggered on the porch trying to regain his equilibrium, and practically carried him to the kitchen table.  She was way stronger than Shawn had expected her to be, and she took most of his weight on the way through the cabin.  His legs were still kind of weirdly tingly and numb at the same time, almost like sleeping limbs waking up—except for not the same at all.  Shawn couldn’t remember if this was what being tased had felt like the last time.  

The chick settled him in one of the chairs, somehow managing to be oddly formal even as she unavoidably groped him in the process, before retreating back to the doorway to hover with the other three paratroopers over the kid, who’d glomped onto Dreadlocks and was climbing him like a tree while chattering as fast as a squirrel.  The paratrooper with the sex hair—the one Shawn assumed was in charge of the rest because they all kept glancing at him like they were waiting for orders—eventually drifted over to the kitchen table and into one of the other chairs.  As soon as that happened, Eliot appeared from wherever he’d run off to and sat down across the small table from the paratrooper, though slightly closer to Shawn than the paratrooper had arranged himself.  Shawn was starting to believe that Eliot was the person they’d invented the phrase ‘mixed signals’ for. 

A few minutes later, Eliot, Shawn and the boss paratrooper guy were still sitting around the kitchen table, uneasily staring at each other, but the three other paratroopers and the guy Gus wanted to grow up to be had responded to some intangible ‘let the guys responsible for this shit figure it the fuck out’ signal that Shawn had apparently missed, and had quietly made their unobtrusive way outside where he figured they were entertaining the kid in the snow, probably with the same amount of uneasy awkward staring.  

“So, _Eliot_ ,” the guy broke the silence, hitting Eliot’s name hard, and Shawn noticed Eliot’s stoic mask become just a little more stoic.  The sex hair guy slouched back in the chair, his expression so calm and collected it was slightly disturbing.  Shawn still didn’t know why _he_ was at the table for this discussion in the first place, other than the whole ‘legs not working properly quite yet’ thing, or the ‘encroach on Eliot’s territory to get him to come running’ thing, but didn’t really want to bring attention to himself enough to ask.  Especially considering he was trapped at the table with two freaking super soldiers.  Or Terminators.  He briefly wondered what came after the T-1000.  Maybe Eliot was a T-5000, and considering he was sitting down with the guy and not putting him through a wall, maybe the guy was a T-6000.  Shawn really needed to watch the movies, so he could get this straight, even though he’d had nightmares as a kid of Linda Hamilton breaking him in half just from watching the previews.  Because Psycho wasn’t a problem, no, but Linda Hamilton?  Now that was some seriously scary shit. 

The guy’s voice was tightly controlled as he continued to talk, and slightly quieter than was easy to hear.  Shawn recognized the technique used when questioning a suspect; they did it in order to pull the suspects into the interrogator’s space as the suspect leaned closer to make out what the interrogator was saying; it gave the interrogator a one up on the suspect via body language.  He’d learned it from Henry when he was nine.  “I’d think we’d both agree that I need the full story, here.  And it’s probably better for you if it comes from you than me finding out later from McKay that you lied to me.  Your hacker might be good, but my guy’s better—he’s the smartest man in two galaxies.  It’s gonna go pretty bad for you if he informs me later of anything you’ve decided to leave out.” 

“That’s oddly specific, the ‘smartest man in two galaxies’ thing.”  Shawn hadn’t realized he’d commented out loud until both sets of cold eyes focused on him.  “Sorry, shutting up,” he mumbled, crossing his arms over his chest and not even caring that he was displaying defensive body language.  It’s not like anyone could blame him, what with two Terminators glaring at him across a tiny, chipped Formica table. 

He could see Sex Hair Guy decide to ignore the Shawn’s remark and Shawn figured the galaxies thing might have been an unintentional slip he didn’t want any attention focused on, and what the hell?  Maybe the guy was a closet geek?  “Seriously, Eliot.  It’d ruin my day to fill out all the paperwork—just tell me what the fuck’s going on.”  Sex Hair Droid rested his elbows on the table, hands folded tamely in front of him, and looked down at his interlaced fingers for a moment.  Shawn couldn’t tell if he was girding his loins to fill out the mysterious and apparently dreaded paperwork, connecting to SkyNet, wondering what was for dinner, or deciding whether or not to kill them all.  The guy was super controlled; none of his body language was giving anything away.  It was disconcerting, to say the least. 

“John,” Eliot began, then sighed.  Aha!  The hair had a name.  Or the guy underneath the hair, anyway.  Eliot suddenly leaned back and slapped his hands on the table.  Shawn jumped, startled, and they both _looked_ at him again.  He really wished they’d stop doing that.  “Cut the interrogation crap, man.  I’ll tell you.  I just didn’t want to drag you all into this, because I know you’re dealing with your own shit.”  He held up a hand when John looked ready to say something.  “I know that I did anyway, bringing Jesse here, but I _swear_ _to God_ , man, I’d die before I let Jesse get hurt.  You _know_ that.”  John relaxed back in his seat, obviously waiting very patiently while Eliot took a few minutes to collect his thoughts. 

“First off, this is Shawn.  Spencer.  No relation.”  Shawn twinkled his fingers at John, but didn’t get a reaction from either of them.  Hoookaaay.  And, apparently, he was more flaming than he’d thought.  “I’ll get to him later.  I’m Eliot Spencer.  That’s Alec Hardison,” he waved in the general direction of the front door the four adults and the kid had left through.  “We work with three others.  I’m sure you know all this already.”  

“As well as the fact that your criminal record is longer than a Learjet,” John interjected sourly. 

Eliot put his face in his hands for a moment, looking like how Shawn felt when he was trying to logically explain his leaps in intuitive deductive reasoning to Lassy.  “Yeah.  About that.  I was with the government for a while, working for them doing black ops and wet work and retrieval and all that—I’m pretty sure it’s all still classified— _I_ wasn’t even cleared to read my own file after one of them.”  John’s face shifted very slightly at that, and Shawn realized John had probably broke some—a lot of—rules and managed to see the whole thing.  Eliot didn’t notice though, because he wasn’t looking at anything but his hands, and he continued, “But then things went south on an op and they, the government, they cut me loose.  They’d got me right out of high school, so what they taught me was all I knew, and, well, I used it.  Hired hitter, stealing shit, retrieval specialist, all that.  But then Nate came along, and it was the first time I’d worked with a team since I—since Uncle Sam cut me loose.  The job went FUBAR, but Nate pulled us together and we fixed it, and made the big score, too, the one to retire on.  We could have all lived like kings and never worked again.  But…  Anyway, we went white-hat. 

“We started fixing people’s lives for them.  When some rich fucker screwed them, they came to us and we screwed the fucker back and got them—our clients—back on their feet.  Sometimes we took a percentage of what we got for them, and sometimes we spent more of our own than we made.  And it went on that way for a while.”  Shawn was fascinated, and tried really hard not to be noticed and sent away or censored in front of.  It seemed to be working.  John was focused on Eliot, and Eliot was still staring down at his hands.  “But then this Italian bitch got her hooks in Nate, and threatened to kill us if he didn’t do what she wanted.”  He stopped staring at his hands and fixed John with a glare that practically sizzled.  “The bitch threatened his _team_.  _My_ team.  He couldn’t ignore her.  I understood that.  You better fucking well understand that, too.”  

John met the glare with a calm gaze and a mildly sardonic eyebrow-raise.  “Believe me, I understand.  I’m just surprised you do.”  

Eliot nodded sharply and sucked in a quick breath, like the comment had been a hit below the belt, and looked back at his hands.  It was like breaking the code of silence or whatever was actually physically painful for him.  “She aimed us at this international crime lord, king-pin, whatever you want to call it.  His name’s Damien Moreau.  We’d been working on getting closer to him for a while, and then when we were doing a job in Santa Barbara, the job that Shawn was helping us with,” he cut a glance over at Shawn, who avoided his eyes, “we found out he—Moreau—was coming there.  It was the chance to take him down, tossed right in our fucking laps.  Nate got fixated on it, and I don’t know.  Maybe he wasn’t looking at all the possibilities, maybe one of us fucked up, maybe his guys were just better than us, but he found out we were there and looking for him before we knew what happened, we were made, and he was out to kill.  

“Moreau wanted to fucking erase us just for thinking about going after him, let alone actually trying.  So we scattered.  Only way we could think to live long enough to go after him again.  Stayed off the grid.  We were sure he didn’t know about Shawn’s help, especially since he’d been helping us with the Santa Barbara job and not the Moreau thing, and that he’d be safe, but then he disappeared.  Dropped completely off the face of the Earth.”  Shawn winced, but noticed the flicker across John’s face at Eliot’s word choice nonetheless.  Interesting. 

“So you figured this Moreau guy had gone after him,” John concluded with a glance at Shawn.  Shawn avoided his eyes, too.  He might have been channeling the age-old five-year-old’s ploy of ‘if I can’t see you, you can’t see me, and if you can’t see me, you can’t punish me,’ but it seemed to have been working so far, because both of them were mostly ignoring him. 

“Yeah.  But then I talked to his friend and Gus said he thought Shawn had just run away again, and we tracked him down here.”  Eliot looked at John earnestly.  It was an expression Shawn hadn’t seen on Eliot’s face before.  It looked weird and out of place on Eliot’s features.  “I swear, John, if I’d thought for a second that Moreau had really stashed him in some Podunk ski-lodge, I wouldn’t have brought Jesse here.  I wouldn’t put him in danger, you know that.” 

John was silent for a few moments.  Shawn felt awkward and tense, and Eliot looked like he was strung tighter than… something that was strung really tight.  He’d never really gotten that metaphor.  Simile?  Whatever.  John broke Shawn’s train of thought by sighing loudly.  

“Dammit, Tom—Eliot, I really kinda wanted to kill you for this,” he muttered under his breath, and Eliot relaxed.  Shawn had no clue why John’s talking about killing him was _relaxing_ to Eliot.  Maybe it was a military thing.  “Damien Moreau, you said?”  At Eliot’s nod, John tapped an ear and Shawn finally paid enough attention to notice there was a little radio-thing tucked in his weirdly pointed ear.  Maybe he was a Vulcan, not a Terminator.  That’d certainly explain the ‘two galaxies’ thing, at least.  “Okay, guys, safe to come in.  You get all that, McKay?”  He was silent for a moment, then made a face.  “Well, that explains part of it.  Fucking Trust.”  Maybe that was a Vulcan curse or something, because it certainly didn’t make any sense otherwise.  

The paratroopers, Hardison and the kid (who wasn’t, after all, Eliot’s and Hardison’s love child, _thank God_ ) all came in covered in snow and red from the cold.  Jesse flung himself at his dad again, and John hefted the kid to his shoulders as he stood up.  “We’ve gotta head back.  This wasn’t exactly… official.”  He had a muttered conversation with his kid that Shawn couldn’t overhear, then tilted his head back to grin up at the beaming kid perched on his shoulders and wrapping the Hair around tiny little fists.  “Okay, buddy.”  He looked back at Eliot.  “I’m taking Jesse to At- taking him with us for the night.  I’ll bring him back tomorrow—there’s a couple of things I can find out that might help you with this Moreau guy, if I can get clearance to tell you.”  He paused for a moment, then added thoughtfully, “I don’t think I’m gonna kill you for lying to me, since Jesse wasn’t in any danger.  But do it again, and I can’t promise anything for Ronon.  He’s kinda trigger happy, I think you noticed earlier, and Jesse’s like a little brother to him.”  Eliot nodded, shooting the big guy a glance that had respect and rage and the will to kill all rolled up into one.  Shawn wondered what _that_ was all about.  

John tapped his ear-radio-thing again, even though all his paratroopers were standing right next to him.  “ _Daedalus_ , five to bring home.  Repeat, five.  Extra signature JJS07232008JPSLMC.  Confirmed.”  He stared levelly at Eliot for a moment, then winked at him, including Shawn in the gesture.  “Oh, and in return for us helping out with your little Moreau thing, here, I expect to see you both buckin’ bales on the ranch next summer.”  

Shawn didn’t even have a chance to wonder what the hell ‘buckin’ bales’ meant or what ranch John was talking about before there was a flash of intense white light and they were gone.  Shawn blinked rapidly and stared at where the five of them had been standing.  He hadn’t _really_ thought John was a Vulcan.  Holy shit.  He totally agreed with the stunned mutter coming from where Hardison was standing off to his right. 

“If some brother with a strobe light comes to wipe my memory now, I’m going to be _so pissed_.”

 

**12.**   

Jesse loved Atlantis, almost as much as she loved him.  Not only did he have John’s supersized ATA gene (and then some), but he’d been born here.  John tried to prevent the sappy smile from spreading across his face as he watched Jesse run off down the corridors, with limited success.  John was perfectly secure in the knowledge that this was the one place in two galaxies that his son was completely safe.  Atlantis wouldn’t let anything hurt Jesse—not even John.  (And that had been a really annoying two hours he’d been stuck in that force field during their visit last year when he’d tried to give Jesse a swat on the ass for leaping from one of the upper story balcony railings before McKay had gotten him out of the field.  Sure, Atlantis hadn’t let Jesse fall, but what if Jesse had tried to fly back at the ranch where there weren’t mother-henning force fields to keep him from splatting all over the goddamned place on landing? 

Jesse was his father’s son—he’d do anything to fly.  And that scared the shit out of John.  John was starting to understand what his mom had gone through raising _him_ , and wished she was still around to give him some pointers.) 

John forced back the besotted grin (because really, no one needed to see that on the face of their commanding officer and the newly reinstated military head of Atlantis), and nodded to Richard Woolsey, the civilian director of the expedition, when he caught his eye.  The man was hovering over the technician’s shoulder up by the DHD on the second level of the gate room, as if his presence would actually speed up the work of one of McKay’s many minions.  The gate tech, chained to his currently unnecessary post by Woolsey’s presence, had a long-suffering look on his face. 

McKay’s minion was ignoring both of them fairly resolutely as she worked on the guts of the DHD, detritus strewn around her in a way that suggested McKay’s work habits were rubbing off on his underlings.  The gate repairs/modifications the SGC had suggested (ordered) must be taking longer than Carter had predicted—but at least they were on Earth and therefore had access to the SGC’s gate on an occasional basis to keep up with their allies and trading partners back in Pegasus, even if it was only via radio, seeing as the Atlantis gate was the only one in Pegasus with the inter-galactic chip and a visit would mean they were stranded in Pegasus till the Powers That Be released Atlantis back to Pegasus.  

John made a mental note to see about getting McKay in on the repairs, despite the fact that McKay would probably rant and complain that he had so many other more important things to do (which was really just a cover for how McKay didn’t want to work with Carter since she’d recently torn apart one of the few papers McKay had managed to get through the censor board to publish), because having to gate through the SGC was such a goddamn hassle.  Besides, McKay could probably have the stargate back up and running in a couple of minutes with both hands tied behind his back.  And the sooner the ‘gate was back to being operational again, the sooner Atlantis could get back to what she was supposed to be doing—protecting the denizens of Pegasus from the Wraith. 

It was ridiculous, really, how long it had taken for some brass-hat to give the okay to just fly Atlantis between the two galaxies, what with the wormhole drive and finding PX5-983’s ZPM stash.  (There had been almost a hundred, most of them fully charged.  John had been surprised that McKay didn’t spontaneously combust on the spot.) 

There’d been a concerted effort from both the IOA and the White House brass to keep the city on Earth (or at least in the Milky Way), and they had seemed to be immune to reason or logic and just waved off everything John brought to the table.  So he’d sicced Teyla on them. 

So now the _Daedalus_ was no longer being wasted on intergalactic supply runs, and Atlantis hopped between galaxies once every couple of months to pick up groceries and rotate out personnel.  Not only had regular leave time improved his command’s morale considerably, Atlantis’s black market had boomed accordingly (if counter-intuitively).  Granted, they rarely actually visited Earth itself, what with the paranoia about the Wraith (even though McKay and Carter had assured everyone the wormhole drive was untrackable) and instead usually met up with the _Daedalus_ or one of her sister ships in some out of the way dead system or pocket of empty space to exchange packages and personnel. 

But maybe he could put off badgering McKay until McKay took over the ‘gate repairs out of sheer, unrelenting boredom, and instead use Woolsey’s being at loose ends to his advantage. 

John tapped his radio, switching to the command-staff-only channel, and asked, “Woolsey, could I have a minute?  Got something I want to ask you about.”  The man had been with the NID and the IOA through the whole initial discovery of the Trust thing, after all.  Maybe, if John asked nicely, Woolsey would pull a few strings for him and find out who the hell this Damien Moreau guy really was.  Might as well make use of the fact that his son had the whole expedition wrapped around his little finger, after all. 

“Of course, Colonel.  I’ll see you in my office after the debriefing.”

 

***

 

Eliot wasn’t exactly refusing to believe what he’d just seen, but if there was one thing he’d learned in his life, it was that denial and willful ignorance made it possible to deal with a whole load of shit.  So he was determinedly not thinking about the fact that five people had just disappeared into thin fucking air right in front of his eyes. 

Hardison, however, didn’t seem to follow the same philosophy as Eliot; he’d scrounged up a pair of sunglasses and was wearing them inside—at night—while hunched over his laptop, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the corner of the kitchen, muttering to himself and typing furiously. 

Shawn was… Eliot looked around.  Shawn was gone.  What the fuck?  He made a quick sweep of the cabin, but Shawn was nowhere to be found.  He’d still been here after… after, so John hadn’t …taken him with them.  Eliot forced down the memory and ignored the part of his brain that thought Hardison had a pretty damn good idea, what with the cowering in the corner.  Not that Hardison would _admit_ to cowering, even if he was, and that didn’t mean Eliot wasn’t gonna bring it up later, when things had calmed down.  

Well, at least this would take his mind off whatever the fuck just happened.  He had a purpose now to distract him—find Shawn.  Eliot hoped this wasn’t the start of a pattern to their relationshi- Okay, now his brain wanted to dwell hysterically on the fact that he’d kissed Shawn earlier.  Fuck, practically tried to swallow him whole, if he was remembering right.  Admittedly, a better substitute than the people disappearing into thin air while he watched, but Eliot didn’t do hysterics.  So Eliot needed a plan of action.  First off, find Shawn.  Then, find enough alcohol to wipe this whole day from his memory. 

It was a good plan. 

Eliot slipped out the front door quietly, not that Hardison was paying attention to anything other than his computer screen.  For all the paranoia, he’d be screwed if some G-man wanted to take him out, but Eliot was highly doubting the likelihood of that possibility. 

Calmly, Eliot surveyed the footprints in the snow, compartmentalizing everything but his present task into a little box that was made of six-inch steel and padlocked shut, stowed somewhere in the back of his mind.  The snow in front of the cabin was disturbed, to say the least, from Jesse and his watchers playing in it.  He blinked momentarily at the blobby snowman that loomed in the south eastern corner of the yard—how had they gotten it so big in so little time?  He ignored it after determining it looked more like a giant crouching frog than anything human. 

There were two sets of footprints leading west away from the mess of tracks in front of the cabin.  Eliot crouched briefly by the tracks, suppressing a brief shiver and noting absentmindedly in a corner of his mind that he probably should have put on a coat before slipping out of the cabin, and determined from the scuff pattern on the undisturbed snow that one set of tracks led to the cabin, and the other away from it.  There were no other tracks outside the mess in front of the cabin, so John and his team must have appeared either in the yard or on the porch.  He shied away from that thought, and directed his attention back to the task at hand. 

Both sets of tracks must be Shawn’s then, one from when he arrived, and one from just now.  He followed the tracks leading away, not that they diverged much from the ones leading here (and occasionally overlapped the tracks leading to the cabin in places), focusing his attention on the trail to the exclusion of all else, though he kept an ear out for misplaced sounds in case someone was following him. 

The same corner of his mind that had commented on the need for a coat tried to point out that Eliot was exhibiting signs of shock—aka being severely fucked in the head—but he ignored the little internal voice that was beginning to sound a little too much like Captain Greene, his first CO, for Eliot’s peace of mind.  

Shawn and alcohol, that was the mission.  Once he had those, he’d be able to get through till tomorrow, and deal with it all then.  The part of his mind that was providing annoying commentary wanted to know when Shawn had become necessary for Eliot’s continued sanity.  He ignored that, too.

 

***

 

When Eliot stalked into his cabin, Shawn wasn’t really surprised.  He didn’t even really know why he’d left Eliot and Hardison’s cabin in the first place—well, other than the fact that Hardison had been starting to make him seriously paranoid, what with the sunglasses and the message boards and the constant muttering about Area 51 and government conspiracies. 

Shawn had gotten enough of that from Dennis the UFO boy's case to last him a lifetime.  

Eliot beelined for where he was sprawled on the couch and sat down next to him, grabbing the bottle of vodka from the coffee table where Shawn had left it that morning and taking a huge swig as he relaxed into the couch.  Shawn could feel a line of fire down the side of his body where Eliot was pressed up against him. 

True, it wasn’t a very big couch, but it wasn’t that tiny either. Eliot hadn't _had_ to sit so close. 

But the king of mixed messages just sat there silently and took another long gulp of vodka straight from the bottle held loosely in his right hand.  His left arm had draped itself around Shawn’s shoulders when he sat down, and the entire left side of his body was pressed up against Shawn’s.  Eliot’s body heat was burning through Shawn’s clothes to scorch his skin, despite the fact dude had just come from a ten-minute hike in the snow without a jacket.  

Shawn had been staring at the blank screen of the cabin’s cheap little TV set before Eliot had barged in and, and, _sat_ at him.  But hey, Shawn could be quiet too, it just took—he leaned out of Eliot’s arm for a moment to palm the glass pipe from the table.  He lit up as he rested back against Eliot’s arm, holding the smoke deep in his lungs for a long moment before he exhaled.  He could be quiet too.

 

***

 

John could never really get over the feeling of having been summoned to the principal’s office whenever he had a meeting with Woolsey, but he sucked it up.  He'd been the one to ask for the meeting, after all. 

Sure enough, Woolsey was already sitting behind the desk and doing the Mr. Burns-esque finger-steepling thing when Atlantis opened the door for John.  He stepped into the room and caught himself slipping into parade rest—he covered it by sitting in one of the guest chairs in front of the desk, slouching down to sit on the base of his spine, though that didn't do anything to negate the whole ‘about to get detention and be heavily disappointed at’ vibe, so he leaned forward and propped his elbows on his knees instead.  

“What is it, Colonel?”  Woolsey prompted, after John hadn’t said anything for a few seconds. 

John gathered his thoughts.  “It’s about the Trust,” he started, then paused, not quite sure where to go from there.  Woolsey sat up a little straighter, and put his hands flat on the desk.  Which was good, because John always had to struggle not to call him Mr. Burns when he did the finger-steepling thing, and that really wouldn’t help his cause.  

“What about the Trust?  Is this in relation to your last mission—they can’t possibly have expanded to other planets?  Their Al’kesh was destroyed years ago, and they don’t have access to the stargates…” 

“Not exactly.  It’s not from the mission, it’s from... After.  You know, when we picked up Jesse.”  Woolsey nodded for him to go on, his posture easing a little.  John briefly considered whether or not to lay it all out for him, but while he trusted Woolsey, a lot of it wasn’t his to tell.  “Tom, the guy who’s been looking after Jesse for me, is on the run from one of their big players.  Has been for a while.  He… can take care of himself.  I think that if we give him some help, he could even maybe—no, I think he definitely could—take out this guy who’s after him.  It’s a win-win for us too, because we’d be down one less Trust operative and wouldn’t have to spend time or resources on it.” 

Woolsey looked at him steadily for a moment, and John could almost see the gears turning in the man’s head.  Finally, he gave John a small nod and stood up.  “I’ll think about it.”  John easily read the nonverbal ‘dismissed,’ and left the room with an answering nod for Woolsey.  Sure, it wasn’t an unequivocal yes, but it wasn’t a no either.  Woolsey had to know that John wasn’t giving him all the facts, but after all this time working together, he knew Woolsey trusted him.  The question was: how far?

 

***

 

Eliot woke up with a crick in his neck, a hangover the size of Texas, and a taste in his mouth like something had crawled in there and just up and died in the middle of the night.  He groaned and tried to crack his neck, clenching his jaw at the nausea that surged through him at even that much movement.  And then the electric blanket covering most of his left side twitched. 

He was across the room practically before he’d opened his eyes, leaving Shawn collapsed across the couch and grumbling in his sleep. 

“Shit,” he said calmly.  What had he—Oh.  His memories of the previous day came flooding back, rushing though his mind like some sort of tsunami.  “Goddamn,” he muttered after it’d all hit him again.  Eliot looked at Shawn again to make sure he was out of it, not that he’d really looked away, and noticed the pipe dangling precariously from Shawn’s fingers.  Gingerly, not wanting to wake Shawn up, he made his way quietly back over to the couch and rescued the piece. 

Eliot briefly considered just trashing the damn thing, but resisted the urge long enough to put it on the coffee table.  Sure, the last thing he needed was Shawn stoned, but it wasn’t really any of his business how Shawn coped with shit, especially considering Eliot’s own methods.  He tossed the afghan from the back of the couch over Shawn, because the cabin was fairly chilly now that he wasn’t sharing body heat, and left.  

Hopefully Hardison hadn’t had some sort of psychotic break while he’d been gone. 

After a long, fucking freezing walk, the blast of warm air from his and Hardison’s cabin when he opened the front door was pure bliss.  Hardison was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, looking perfectly unfazed and well rested despite yesterday’s trauma.  Eliot wished his freakouts had an off switch like Hardison’s apparently did.  

He ignored Hardison’s greeting in favor of the bathroom, where he was going to worship the porcelain god and shower and _dear Lord_ brush his teeth.  The shock of remembering yesterday and the freezing temperatures outside had helped him ignore his nausea on the walk to the cabin, but now that he was back and warm again his hangover was reasserting itself and he wanted nothing more than to curl up and die on the nice cold bathroom tiles next to the toilet.

 

***

 

When Shawn woke up, his nose was freezing and Eliot had done that thing he did so well again and disappeared.  Shawn fingered the afghan draped over him though, and felt a tiny smirk grow on his lips.  “Well, shucks, El,” he muttered to the empty cabin, “someone might start thinking you actually cared.”  The smirk quickly morphed into a frown. 

Yeah, he was never pulling that attempt at Eliot’s drawl out in front of anyone, ever.  Even he could tell it was awful. 

Shawn flung the afghan back and stumbled sleepily to the bathroom, and then to the kitchen, still working on waking up.  The previous day’s events hadn’t faded from his memory or anything, but sleeping on it had transitioned his mental refrain from _Holy shit!_ to _Holy shit, that was cool!_  

He was definitely heading back over to Eliot’s cabin as soon as he had had enough caffeine to function.  And a shower, he amended when a sniff check to his pits had him pulling back with a grimace.  There was no way in hell he was missing a chance to see Scotty beam the Vulcan down from the Enterprise in real life.  Real-life Star Trek—seriously.  Best day _ever_.  And then there was always the chance that Mixed Message Man—also known as one Eliot Spencer—would kiss Shawn again.  He wasn’t gonna chance missing _that_ , either.

 

 

 

 

 **13.**  

Apparently, death wasn’t as easy as a fifth of vodka and a cold bathroom floor.  Once Eliot had purged the contents of his stomach into the toilet—repeatedly—he resigned himself to living, and to a blisteringly hot shower.  He dry-heaved a few more times under the showerhead's high pressured spray, but after about half an hour he’d had as much as he could stand.  He turned off the water and slid back the curtain, letting a cloud of steam escape into the still-chilled bathroom, feeling more or less human again. 

At least until he caught sight of Shawn sitting on the closed lid of the toilet seat. 

“Shit, man!” Eliot yelped, and yanked the curtain back to cover himself so violently a couple of the cheap rings holding it to the bar snapped and fell to the tiled floor in a clatter of broken plastic.  

Shawn just raised his eyebrows and smirked at him, the bastard.  “I’d say I’m sorry for creepin’ on you, but…  Dude.  Don’t most people take their clothes _off_ to shower?” 

Eliot stared back, thanking God that his skin was still flushed with heat from the shower, preventing Shawn from seeing the blush he could feel creeping up his neck.  The tiled floor had leeched all the heat from his body and all he’d wanted was to get warm again—taking off his clothes had seemed like too much fucking work at the time.  He blamed the hangover for the fact he’d forgotten he wasn’t naked when he noticed Shawn. Eliot's wet clothes clung annoyingly to his skin, and were getting cold fast.  “It seemed like the thing to do at the time,” he mumbled under his breath, dropping the much-abused shower curtain and grabbing a towel from the rack by the tub to scrub some of the water out of his hair. 

No way was he taking off his wet clothes to get the rest of the way dry though, even if it resulted in pneumonia, what with Shawn eyeing him like he was starring in some absurd wet t-shirt contest. “Why the fuck are you here, anyway?”  His head was throbbing viciously, and he’d been really looking forward to avoiding Shawn for the rest of the day—if not the rest of his life—after the cuddle-fest he’d woken up to that morning.  Eliot had had enough surprises in the past few days to last him the next couple of years, easy, so he wasn’t feeling very sociable. 

“Are you kidding?  No way was I missing a chance to see the Vulcan beam back down from the Enterprise.”  Eliot forced himself to keep a straight face, because damn Shawn and damn his _stupid_ sense of humor and the way it made Eliot want to laugh.  John actually did look more like a Vulcan than half the costumed freaks Eliot had seen at the last geek convention Hardison had dragged him to.  After a short pause, Shawn added, “And I’m in _here_ because I _thought_ you’d be _naked_.”  

Well, he had to give the guy points for honesty, at least.

 

***

 

Shawn couldn’t believe he’d just said that.  He blamed his eyes for distracting his brain from what was coming out of his mouth as he took a self-guided tour of the ‘look, don’t touch’ variety of all the extremely _interesting_ ways Eliot’s soaked long sleeved t-shirt clung to and outlined his remarkably defined muscles, and the perfectly delicious way that wet denim was hugging his thighs.  At least Shawn hadn’t licked his lips at him.  That should count for something.  

Eliot stared at him like he’d grown a second head or a third arm or a mutant child from the middle of his chest and edged around the perimeter of the bathroom, staying as far from Shawn as possible and not taking his eyes off him for a second until he hit the door and hightailed it out of the bathroom. 

Shawn rolled his eyes and let his head fall back against the wall behind the toilet with a dull thud.  “Way to freak him the fuck out, Shawn,” he muttered to the empty bathroom, disgusted with himself.  Eliot had been having enough heterosexual freakouts (or at least that’s what Shawn assumed they were) to last anyone else a lifetime, and here Shawn had gone and put a match to the powder keg of yet another one. 

Gus had always said that Shawn needed a better brain to mouth filter—maybe Gus had actually been right for once.  Not that Shawn would ever admit that to Gus, because the ‘I was right’ dance got old fast—shit, Gus! With all the excitement of yesterday, he’d completely spaced—no, wait, he _did_ call, and they’d had another iteration of the ‘what you want to be when you grow up’ conversation.  Fuck. 

Maybe he really did need to quit with the drinking and the smoking and shit if he was forgetting big stuff like entire Gus conversations.  Because, well, forgetting where he’d put his phone or his keys or his pants was one thing, but not remembering that an entire two-hour conversation had even occurred was bad.  Badbadbad with a capital B.  Also, really annoying.  He didn’t know how other people did it.  Did normal people’s memories suck this bad, or was he actually sub-normal now?  

He dragged his mind out of that rut before it started circling and brought it back to the matter at hand.  It didn’t take his completely-wasted-on-Shawn (at least, according to Henry) genius-level IQ to figure out Eliot had liked Shawn looking at him in the shower—Shawn had eyes and had been using them very assiduously at the time, and wet jeans clung to _everything_ —so what was with the running?  Especially since Eliot was the one who’d kissed _him_ the previous day and the one who’d curled up next to _him_ on the couch last night, tucking his nose into Shawn’s neck and muttering garbled secrets Shawn couldn’t hear to understand into his skin. 

Seriously, what the hell. 

Shawn didn’t know if he’d ever understand what was going on inside Eliot’s complicated head, and was starting to think trying might be a lost cause. And tragically, Shawn knew himself well enough to know that that was a big part of his attraction to Eliot, never mind the way dude filled out his jeans. 

Which he did.  Superbly. 

Shawn thumped his head against the wall again once more, almost thoughtfully this time.  In his admittedly limited experience with the man, Eliot had initiated everything, whether it was something to fuel Shawn’s hopes for gay!Eliot or...  Well, really, _everything_ fueled Shawn’s hopes for gay!Eliot, but seriously, dude started _everything_.  And if the situation didn’t let Eliot start something, he took control of things as soon as humanly possible.  Great.  _Another_ control freak.  You’d think Shawn had got enough of that from dealing with the cops at work—detectives were the absolute worst about it.  

Shawn wasn’t some college co-ed looking for his daddy bear to take care of everything for him, he was a grown man.  He wanted—oh, god—an equal, not a daddy or a groupie.  Fuck.  He wanted a partner.  Someone who’d call him on his bullshit occasionally (or more than just occasionally) instead of believing everything that came out of his mouth (which was probably why his little thing for Jules had faded so quickly).  

Shit.  He really was growing up. 

Gus would be so proud.  

Shawn felt like puking.  

At least Henry hated Eliot, that was a point in his favor, not to mention the whole ‘gay-or-actually-bisexual-even-if-you-don't-understand-the-difference-old-timer for real and you can’t pretend it’s just a phase anymore’ thing promised to send Henry through the roof.  Shit, now he was imagining domestic bliss and daydreaming about re-introducing Eliot to his father.  

Shawn was really good at running away from his problems, and so he ran out of that bathroom and far away from that revelation of his adulthood as fast as his two legs could carry him. 

And right into Dreadlocks’ chest.

 

***

 

John watched with bemusement as Ronon caught the other Spencer and steadied him before he bounced off Ronon’s chest and fell on his ass.  John couldn’t imagine why Eliot had come out of the bathroom sopping wet a minute before Shawn had raced out of the room like it was on fire.  Wasn’t going there.  Didn’t _want_ to.  This was becoming more and more like a routine (read: totally fucked up) mission with over-complicated natives and a bargaining table and Teyla giving him that raised eyebrow that meant he’d done something wrong when he totally hadn’t even done anything at all.  Shit. 

Same story, different planet. 

He’d just never expected it to be _this_ one. 

At least here he didn’t have to worry about death by bondage (P3X-653 was a seriously fucked up planet, and they were never going back again, he didn’t care _how_ much Teyla loved their damned textiles.) if things went to shit here.  Probably. 

Woolsey had come through with a tidbit of information for John to pass on to Eliot.  It wasn’t much and probably wasn’t going to help much either, but Woolsey wanted John to vet Eliot before giving him anything substantial, so he was supposed to tag along and see what Eliot did with this newfound knowledge.  

Eliot returned from the bedroom after a costume change that had to have broke the land-speed record, still rubbing at his damp hair with a towel.  He’d signaled for John to hold up a second when he’d dashed by earlier without saying a word, leaving them to be stared at like some sort of science project gone wrong by the guy—Alec Hardison—who was leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed over his chest. 

But that was okay, because John was used to that, since McKay looked at him like that all the time. 

Though right now McKay was tapping at his tablet with furious speed, muttering imprecations at it under his breath, and completely ignoring everyone else in the room—but McKay did that all the time, too.  And Ronon was flexing his muscles for the audience and fondling his gun.  So, really, it was a typical off-world mission.  Except on-world.  Or…  John shook it off and focused on Eliot, catching him staring at Shawn staring at Ronon.  _Okaaay..._   

“Down to business,” he started off resolutely, mildly disconcerted when everyone’s attention snapped right to him when he started speaking.  Maybe not a typical off-world mission after all—the natives normally just ignored him, talked over him, or pretended he didn’t even fucking exist until Teyla got him to do the ritual or whatever right. 

Instant respect was sweet.  He could get used to this. 

“Woo- Er, a guy I work with,” _way to almost break protocol the first chance you get, Colonel Fuckup_ , he chided himself silently, “You know what, never mind.  Moreau is part of a larger organization.  Larger as in world-wide.  They’ve stayed under the radar pretty successfully for the past few years, and they’ve got themselves some serious firepower.  Like, stuff that hasn’t made it out of the government labs yet,” he hedged.  He was pretty sure the black dude would spontaneously combust if he said ‘alien,’ and while that would be hilarious to see, they weren’t cleared to know that shit.  McKay snorted quietly and rolled his eyes at his tablet while Teyla and Ronon stared at John blankly.  He continued, slightly flustered—he wasn’t normally this bad at this.  Or maybe he was, and he just couldn’t tell because it wasn’t his own culture.  “Um.  So.  They call themselves the Trust-” 

Shawn interrupted him, practically bouncing on his toes.  “No shit, the Trust?  Like with the _the_ too?  That’s-” he broke off, interrupted by Ronon’s hand plastering itself across his mouth, and went back to quietly staring up at the big guy.  

John could see a weird mixture of healthy self-preservation instinct—also known as fear—and lust in Shawn’s features as he made googly-eyes at Ronon, and it was the lust that made him motion for Ronon to move his hand before Eliot tried to rip it off and beat the big guy to death with it.  He wasn’t even looking at Eliot, but he could practically feel the rage sizzling off the guy from where he was standing two feet to John’s left.  He looked back at Eliot, who nodded for him to continue, outwardly calm except for the slight narrowing of his eyes.  Okay, that was a little scary, but cool at the same time. 

John noticed Shawn glance over at Eliot out of the corner of his eye, and whatever Shawn noticed made Shawn immediately take a big, un-surreptitious step back from the big guy.  Heh.  Someone was whipped.  

“Anyway,” to say John was used to this kinda thing happening in the background of talks with the natives would be an understatement, and he continued unfazed.  Or at least only as fazed as he’d been before.  “They operate in autonomous cells, and a lot of the members are some pretty influential people, either with our government, foreign governments, or in the private sector, which is why we don’t know their super-secret handshake yet.”

 

***

 

“Influential we can deal with,” Eliot muttered to himself, thinking of Sophie and the rumor that she was the black sheep of a pretty blue-blooded family.  

By rumor, he meant Hardison and his computer and his ‘mad ninja hack skills,’ which was a direct quote from the man in question.  If Eliot ever found himself thinking up terms like that in his own head, he’d shoot himself.  Or at least shoot Hardison.  Because even though he didn’t really like guns, he’d make an exception for that.  Eliot was as good with a gun as he was with any other weapon, maybe better.  But he didn’t like guns because they were a shortcut, a tool that made lazy idiots lethal.  The kind of firepower John was talking about…  That was a whole lot of lethal.  By the way John talked around the subject, Eliot could tell the shit in question was probably something that made an H-bomb look like a bug zapper. 

“And?” Eliot asked after a moment, wondering if that was all John was going to give them.  

John looked at him and shrugged.  “And if you take them out, you’ll be able to write your ticket with any government in the world.  I don’t know what to tell you, man, it’s all I can give you for now.  If the guys upstairs like what they see you do with what you have, I’ll probably be authorized to give you more.  But I’m betting that that’s enough to get your guy over there started,” he inclined his head at Hardison, “in a big way.”

 

***

 

Everyone had been quiet and thinky for way too long, and Shawn couldn’t stand it any longer.  After all, it was common knowledge that he bored easily.  “Weren’t you bringing the kid back today?” he asked curiously, keeping a wary eye on Dreadlocks and his grabby, grabby hands.  

John turned to stare at him for a second, then grinned.  “I couldn’t tear him away from Doc- Kel- Jennifer,” he stumbled over the name and Shawn mentally rolled his eyes at the excessive secrecy.  “She hadn’t seen him for a few years because she was on leave the last time he visited, and since we’re safe on Ear- the base is on stand-down, I figured a couple more days couldn’t hurt.” 

The guy with the tappy tablet thing finally spoke up, “Couldn’t hurt who?  For all you know, he’s managed to lower the cloak since we’ve been gone.  Wouldn’t _that_ be exciting and fun to explain?” he asked sarcastically, though he never looked up from what he was doing on his tablet.  Shawn was betting on Spider Solitaire—the guy had that level of intense concentration going. 

 

 

 

 

 **14.**  

“McKay,” John started to protest the slur on his genes, but was cut short by McKay talking over him. 

“Hah!  Got through,” McKay announced smugly, finally looking up from his tablet and his eyes zeroing in on the guy across the room who was still leaning against the wall, feigning casualness.  “Take that, you second rate _script bunny_!”  Or at least, that’s what John thought he heard.  “Put a virus in _my_ system…” he muttered, and the Hardison guy pushed himself off the wall and across the room towards McKay.  John tensed for a moment at the perceived attack on one of his team members, but then remembered he was dealing with geeks, here.  While he might have to worry about bombs or maybe robots shooting lasers out of their eyes, he really doubted that their throwdown was about to turn into a brawl.  

“It wasn’t—okay, it was a virus, but it wasn’t going to hurt anything!” Eliot’s hacker complained.  

“That you know of,” McKay snorted derisively, waving off the looming black dude like he was insignificant.  “You have no clue what your little wormy virus could have fucked up.  I, however, know exactly what would have happened, because oh, right, I’m _smarter_ than you are.  Not to mention it’s _my_ system that _I_ designed.  And while I’m sure you would have been sorry when we ended up as scattered molecules across the universe, I’d rather not die first.  And also?  Don’t think I didn’t notice you lifted that line of code from that CIA hack six months ago.  If you’re gonna copy and paste, at least do it with something that’s not inherently flawed.” 

“I can’t plagiarize my own code,” the looming hacker glowered at McKay, “and it’s _not_ inherently flawed.”  

John smirked, then rolled his eyes as McKay began to expound on the myriad ways the code was indeed flawed, and John tuned McKay out and focused on the other two ‘natives.’  Eliot was glaring at Hardison, and Shawn was glaring at Eliot, switching to gazing adoringly at Ronon whenever Eliot glanced at him.  Interesting.  Or, at least, more so than the geek-off.

 

***

 

After a couple of minutes, watching the live-action flame war got old.  It was ten times as annoying, Eliot decided, to listen to both sides of the smear campaign, rather than just Hardison crowing insults from in front of his computer.  And he ‘got’ to hear that a lot.  It was something he really hadn’t missed at all in the time the team had spent apart. 

Speaking—or thinking—of which, that was a good excuse to distract Hardison with.  “Enough,” he snarled at Hardison, and grabbed his arm to tow him away from his arch-nemesis.  Okay, so maybe he was taking a little misplaced aggression out on Hardison, what with Shawn making moon-calf eyes at John’s enforcer, but it worked. 

And this way he didn’t have to think about his ‘feelings’ or how Shawn was affecting them, so it was a win/win situation for Eliot.  “You can play later.  Right now I need you to track down Nate and Parker and Sophie.  We’re gonna need them for this.” 

“I’m pretty sure I can hold my own without backup,” Hardison growled, and made like he was going to go right back to arguing with John’s scientist.  

Eliot suppressed the urge to punch Hardison.  “I meant for the _job_ ,” Eliot ground out through gritted teeth.  “You know, the Moreau thing?  The whole reason we’re having this happy little get-together in the first place?  Go do your job,” he finished with a shove that sent Hardison stumbling towards his laptop, fortunately still in the room Hardison had been sleeping in. 

Divide and conquer still worked, ‘age of the geek’ or not.  When he looked around for Shawn again after having put Hardison in time out, he couldn’t see him.  Or the woman from John’s team.  That was just great.  The two of them were probably off making little beautiful alien babies, because God knew Shawn just had that effect on people. 

Even when they’d really rather that he not.

 

***

 

Shawn made his excuses to Elise and Dan and collected his last paycheck.  They were sorry to see him go, but after he’d explained the whole story to them, they said their goodbyes and gave him their blessing, as well as a hefty bonus.  Not, of course, that he’d told them the _whole_ story, but rather the classic “my dad died and my cousin and his partner and their adopted kid came to tell me because they were in the area and a phone call is so impersonal,” which nicely explained away his absence at lessons for the past few days and how he and Eliot looked nothing alike.  And he got to pull out the ‘dad is dead’ story again and dust it off.  He’d used it a lot when he’d wanted to move on back in the day, after the first time he’d skipped out of Santa Barbara right before graduation. 

You could say he’d not been too fond of Henry in those days. 

You could also say that he had hated the man with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns. 

Both were equally true. 

The reason he was quitting, barring the fact he had more interesting and exciting things to do with his days than teach tweenies how to snowboard now that his life was a Star Trek convention, was that the guy Gus wanted to be when he grew up had found—or would have, anyway, by the time Shawn got back—the rest of Eliot’s band of merry men with his mad computer skills, and Shawn figured they would be leaving South Dakota soon to add the three of them to the ever-growing tribe of people congregating around Eliot. 

Not that Shawn was jealous.  He was just frustrated at all the excuses the current situation was conspiring to provide Eliot with to avoid A) talking about the thing he had for Shawn with Shawn, B) acting on said thing, and C) even acknowledging Shawn existed. 

Quite frankly, Shawn didn’t even know why they were all assuming he should come with them on this.  

“I mean, sure, it’s awesome.  Vulcan,” he muttered bitterly on the trek back to his cabin from the lodge, “and that one guy’s practically a Klingon, without the receding hairline and the prosthetics, but what the hell am I gonna do to help with the stupid takedown thing?  Sit there and look pretty?  Which, sure, I do pretty good at, but…”  He stopped talking to himself as soon as he began to suspect he wasn’t alone.  

He really, really hoped he’d been speaking too quietly for anyone to make out what he’d been saying.  He’d pretty much failed at every merit badge Henry had made him and Gus attempt in their little fucked-up troop of two, but he remembered that silence in the woods was the sign of a predator—but not a Predator predator, as Gus had kept insisting on all their little outings.  No, silence was usually a sign of a big cat, or a bear, or a human.  Not wolves, though—well, not around Santa Barbara, anyway.  Here?  Maybe. 

Shawn figured it was probably a person—more specifically, that it was probably one of the persons from Eliot’s cabin a few minutes ago—but he still jumped when the lady paratrooper appeared out of fucking nowhere to walk beside him.  There hadn’t been a beam of light, so—he realized with irritation—she’d probably been following him since he’d left the cabin in the first place.  

After walking quietly beside him for a little while, she broke the awkward silence.  “We have not been properly introduced,” she said, stopping and touching his arm to get him to turn and face her, because he’d stopped walking automatically when she had.  “I am Teyla Emmagan of New Athos,” she said with a little bow once he’d turned towards her. 

“Uh.  Kay.”  Shawn responded verbosely and charmingly, staring blankly at her.  

“And you are Shawn Spencer of the Barbarian Saint of Earth?” she asked with a raised eyebrow that made him feel like he’d been called on in class and didn’t have the answer because he hadn’t been paying attention. 

“Uh, yeah.”  Shit, he was articulate.  He fumbled out a hand to shake, not sure what exactly was going on except for the fact that she could probably break him in half like a stick, if the way she’d been able to practically carry him across the cabin the other day had been any indication of her strength. 

She glanced at his hand with momentary confusion, then something seemed to click behind her eyes and she grasped his hand firmly for a moment before releasing it.  Which totally brought home how _alien_ she was, not that he’d really needed reminding, particularly after that ‘of Earth?’ addendum to his name.  (He wasn’t even going to _touch_ the ‘Barbarian Saint’ thing.) 

After watching him patiently for what seemed like forever, Shawn guessed the lady paratrooper—alien—Teyla—got bored, because she started walking again, but heading in the direction of Shawn’s cabin and not Eliot’s.  “Um.  Why are you going to my cabin?” he asked after a few seconds of quietly following her.  

She stopped again, turning to face him, and raised her eyebrow at him again.  He really wished she’d stop doing that.  It was like she was channeling Mrs. Harrison, his second grade teacher, when she did that.  “I had assumed that you would wish to gather your belongings for our relocation.  Forgive me if I assumed incorrectly.” 

“First of all,” Shawn bit out, suddenly annoyed, “even if I was going to ‘gather my belongings,’ I wouldn’t need help.  And secondly, who says I’m going along with you guys to pick up the rest of Eliot’s band of merry men at all?  It’s not like I’m needed or anything,” he grumbled.  Teyla looked like she was about to say something, but Shawn cut her off with a flail of his hands.  “And!  Thirdly!  Why are _you_ all still here?  I thought you were going to just sit back and watch while Eliot went after this big bad Moreau wolf or whatever that you all couldn’t seem to handle.” 

Teyla blinked at him passively.  “Are you finished?” 

“Yes,” he grumped. 

She held up her hand and ticked his points off on her fingers.  “I am following you to your cabin to assist you in the gathering of your belongings because John asked me to ‘keep an eye’ on you.  I assumed you were coming with us to collect your Eliot’s friends because you are obviously important to him and evidence indicates that he cannot function-” Shawn could have almost sworn that she’d almost just said _function within normal parameters_.  She could totally be the android to John's Vulcan.  Though the other guy was practically connected to his laptop-tablet-thing—maybe he was the Borg of the group?  Who cares if he was mixing serieses, this was real life, not fiction.  “-without knowing where you are and if you are well, and from what I have heard both your Eliot and the Colonel say, you are intelligent and come up with solutions that neither of them would have thought of with the available information, so you will be useful to have along.  As for why we are still here, you are correct in that John was ordered to merely observe your Eliot’s actions and provide either additional information, or our assistance, based on how much or little trouble your Eliot got himself into in his pursuit of Moreau.  However, it is well known that John, although he is what you call ‘career military’ and is the military commander of his base, does not follow orders well, especially if John deems them ‘stupid’ or ‘wrong,’” she finished, complete with finger quotes. 

Apparently sarcasm was a universal constant, or else Earth had been rubbing off on her. 

Shawn stared at her blankly.  “He’s not _my_ Eliot,” he finally protested weakly, but all he got in response was the raised eyebrow.  Again.  That was getting real old, real fast. 

He scowled at her and started stomping back down the trail to his cabin, Teyla following quietly behind him.  _Fine._   He’d pack.  He’d go with Eliot on his stupid people-finding scavenger hunt.  He’d watch them take down Moreau from the sidelines, so Eliot could _function_.  And then, and _then_ , Shawn was getting the _hell_ out of Dodge.

 

***

 

Eliot, Hardison, and Shawn were all packed and ready to go, their cabins showing no sign of their stay other than the duffel bags by the porch door of Eliot and Hardison’s cabin.  From the looks of things, John and his team were planning on tagging along, which was something Eliot had mixed feelings about.  He was pretty sure they’d be a help in a fight, but he didn’t know how prone they were to shooting first and asking questions later, or if they’d follow Eliot’s team’s direction or if they’d just take the whole thing over.  He wished he had a chance to find out before push came to shove, but it didn't look promising.  

Hardison had pinpointed Parker and Sophie and Nate’s positions, and with a truck-load of sarcastic remarks and caustic putdowns, John’s team member (Mackey?  McKay?  McCoy?  Something like that.) had smashed the Privacy Act to smithereens to get them the numbers of the burn phones Eliot’s team had been using.  Hardison was on the phone with Parker right now, convincing her to meet them in Dallas.  Sophie was already on a plane to Dallas, and Nate…  Nate had been drunker than a skunk when Hardison had finally gotten a hold of him, so they were probably going to have to go and get him physically. 

At least Nate had been holed up in a bar in Alabama and hadn’t gone to ground in Boston.  Eliot wondered, not for the first time, how the man who was the brains of their little team managed to be such a fucking idiot sometimes.  But Alabama was practically right next door to Texas, so it wasn’t gonna be that big of a hardship to go drag the man off his barstool. 

“Seriously, were you dropped on your head at birth?  Many, many times?  You don’t know _anything_.”  John’s scientist’s insult caught Eliot’s ear, and Eliot started paying attention to the conversation in the corner of the room, where it sounded like he and Shawn were butting heads. 

“ _The best treasure a man can have is a sparing tongue_ ,” Eliot heard Shawn’s stage whisper from almost all the way across the room.  

“No.  No no no no.  You are _not_ quoting _Hesiod_ at me,” Mackey sputtered in outrage. 

“What, I can’t be smart?  Is your world falling apart because I’m not fawning at the feet of your gigantic IQ?” Shawn smirked, and Eliot could see the blood boiling in the other guy’s face.  He began to make his way over to the two of them, pretty sure Shawn was about to give the guy a heart attack or something. 

“Moron,” the guy glared at Shawn.  

“’Highest Genius’ actually, according to wilderdom.com, and I don’t think Mensa spams morons with invites, Doctor McKay, PhD, PhD,” Shawn snarked back.  So it _was_ McKay, then. 

McKay pinched the bridge of his nose between the forefinger and thumb of the hand not holding his tablet and winced.  “What do you people have against joining Mensa?” McKay asked rhetorically as Eliot reached the two of them.  Eliot grabbed Shawn’s arm in order to drag him away from McKay, hopefully before Shawn managed to break the other man. 

“Note to self—have Keller check the _idiot_ for the ATA gene.  Or to see if he’s related in any way to another non-joiner.  Maybe the hair’s a byproduct of the genetic mutation,” McKay continued muttering to himself as Eliot put distance between Shawn and McKay, and Eliot hid a grin at the way Shawn frowned and reached a defensive hand up to touch his hair at McKay’s comment. 

Shawn finally seemed to notice Eliot pulling him across the room, and shook off Eliot’s loose grip on his arm.  “What the fuck, dude, get off me.  I’m allowed to make friends with people who aren’t you,” he glared at Eliot resentfully. 

“Friends?” Eliot choked out, not sure if he was trying not to laugh or yell.  He wasn’t gonna touch the rest of that statement, because, yeah.  “You were about to give the guy a stroke.” 

“Yeah, well.  That’s how I roll,” Shawn flipped him an obviously fake bright smile and headed back towards McKay, apparently intent on jumping right back into it where they’d left off.  

What the hell?  Eliot stared at Shawn’s retreating back.  _Now_ what had he done?  And why the _hell_ did he care?

 

***

 

John and the rest of his team, plus Shawn, were sitting in a private booth in a backwater bar in Alabama, waiting for Eliot and Hardison to coax the guy they’d come for out of the bathroom.  The guy had fled there and locked himself in as soon as he’d seen the seven of them enter the bar, spouting some alcohol-fueled crazy about how they wouldn’t take him alive.  It looked like Eliot and Hardison were going to be a while, so John’s team were amusing themselves with their familiar game of ‘best crazy in Pegasus’. 

“There was that thing on P3X-683,” John pointed out, feeling helpful. 

“Please!  I thought we’d _all_ agreed to never discuss that again.  Ever,” McKay snarled. 

John blinked.  Oh, hell, McKay was talking about the planet with the Super Holy Ritual of Mortifying Public Embarrassment required of all visitors who came through the stargate (and refusal meant death, and also no possibility of trading for the almost-coffee and almost-turkey that John would have given his left nut for).  God.  And he’d _just_ managed to forget about that again, too.  At least you were only required to go through it once.  “Er.  That was P3X-6 _5_ 3, not 83.  I meant the statue thing that-” 

“Yes, right, I remember,” McKay spoke over him.  “With the…” he trailed off, making an incomprehensible gesture with his hands that John had long decided looked like convoluted cussing in American Sign Language.  Or Canadian Sign Language.  Was there a Canadian Sign Language?  He’d long suspected that McKay’s gesticulating was actually him cussing people out in another language.  Learning sign language to berate people in a language they didn’t understand and didn’t know he was speaking was definitely something that sounded like McKay. 

Eliot and Hardison were still across the bar and attempting to talk some sense into their guy through the locked bathroom door.  Their man was obviously soused, and John didn’t envy Eliot his self-appointed task at all.  Apparently, according to their guy, they were all working for Moreau now—and wasn’t that was nice to know.  John shook off that train of thought as Shawn snorted out a laugh, much to the surprise of the rest of the booth, because he’d been uncharacteristically silent up until that point.  John had only known Shawn for a few strange days, and he’d already noticed Shawn’s inability to be quiet. 

After Shawn regained control of himself, he gestured incomprehensibly across the table to McKay, and John felt vindicated at the proof that McKay really had been using sign language all this time.  He also wished he knew it, because whatever Shawn signed had made McKay make that face, the one where McKay thought he was hiding a smile, where half his crooked mouth tilted up and the other half tilted down and his eyes crinkled at the corners. 

When had Shawn learned how to make McKay smile like that?  That was John’s job. 

John scowled.

 

 

 

 

 **15.**  

Shawn scowled at the cheap and oh so _very_ ugly curtains through the dim gloom of his hotel room.  They were in Dallas, and had been now for two days, planning and talking and doing computer things and talking some _more_ and Shawn was so bored by it all that his brain felt like it was going to _explode_.  So he’d retreated to his hotel room to escape the planny-ness, and while it was just as boring sitting on the scratchy bedspread and flipping through the TV’s pay-per-view menus in the dark room, he didn’t feel nearly as useless as he had hovering around the edges of the clusters of competent people doing things he didn’t really understand and talking about things that either didn’t make sense or were just wrong. 

And whenever he’d tried to point out how or why they weren’t making sense or were wrong, they’d look at him like he was some sort of idiot child, so really, he’d just needed to escape. 

Because, after all, he wasn’t here because he was _needed_ or anything.  No, Shawn was just here so Eliot could _focus_ , which, honestly, made him feel more like a whore than anything he’d ever done for money in his misspent youth, including that time at that strip bar with the seedy back room in Mexico. 

There was a tap at his door, and Shawn stayed obstinately silent.  It was obvious he was in the room, seeing as how he didn’t feel the need to turn down the TV or stop flipping through the pay-per-view trailers—oh, _Splice_ … Adrien Brody was a sexy beast, and his movies weren’t half bad either, so Shawn might end up watching that—but that didn’t mean Shawn was going to make it easy for whoever was on the other side of the door.  And yeah, maybe he did feel a bit like a pouting five year old, but hey, kids were smart and they knew what worked. 

That, and sulking in the dark made him feel better, in a weird way. 

Eventually, the periodic tapping went away, and Shawn settled on _Splice_ for his mindless entertainment.  He regretted that decision an hour and a half later when Parker dropped onto his bed—where he totally wasn’t clutching a pillow like a scared little girl—from the vent in the ceiling right as Brody got yanked under the surface of the ominously bubbling water. 

 

***

 

Eliot heard the scream from across the hall and over Sophie’s high pitched list of reasons about—actually, he hadn’t been paying attention, so he didn’t really know what she was going on about, though she obviously had a lot to say about it.  Eliot had been preoccupied with the way Shawn had slunk out of the room a couple of hours ago, and how Parker had told him Shawn wouldn’t answer the door and then some convoluted reason for why she had to use the ventilation shafts to check on him rather than just using a peephole reverser or picking the lock on the door to satiate her stalkerish tendencies.  

Eliot hoped to God it was just surprise that had prompted that blood-curdling scream from Shawn’s room, but he knew that he wasn’t that lucky.  Fuck, with his luck, Moreau had snuck in through the window somehow and was shooting off Shawn’s kneecaps with a silenced gun as Eliot wasted time deciding whether or not he should break down the door.  And that mental image was enough to make the decision for him.  

He kicked the door in, knowing from the way the jarring impact buzzed in his knee and hip that he’d be feeling _that_ for the next few days, and burst into the dimly lit room.  Flickering light from the TV picked out Parker and Shawn tangled on the bed, and Eliot felt his blood run cold.  What the hell?  The same blood curdling scream sounded again, and Eliot’s attention snapped to the TV, where someone was possibly getting stabbed by something.  Or someone.  Loudly.  Shit.  Shawn and Parker were staring at him from the bed, and as the scene changed on whatever movie they were watching, the light the TV cast on the bed brightened and Eliot could pick out Shawn’s arm wrapped around Parker as they fucking snuggled while watching a horror movie. 

Eliot couldn’t decide whether or not witnessing this little domestic scene was worse than actually finding Moreau shooting Shawn’s kneecaps off, and he found that really fucking annoying.  He scowled at the both of them, and turned to stalk back out of the room, but suddenly Parker was in his way and Eliot was regretting all the self-defense moves he’d been teaching her, because she wouldn’t let him past her.  

“Nuh uh.  You’re not blaming me for this, because you _know_ whatever you’re thinking happened never did because you’re my _family_ , Eliot. You _know_ I’d never do that to you.  So stop making excuses and ask him to be your Valentine already,” she hissed into his face, and pushed him backwards hard enough that he staggered into the edge of the bed and had to either sit down or fall down as he unbalanced gracelessly. 

“Today's the 24th, not the 14th, Parker,” Eliot muttered under his breath as Parker made her escape and trapped him in with a Shawn, whose eyes were practically filled with dancing question marks.  Not that he was really and truly trapped, seeing how the doorjamb was splintered out from the wall and there was no way in hell the deadbolt would engage, never mind the possibility of the door even latching, until maintenance got after it with a hammer and a couple pounds of wood glue.  Or just installed a new frame.

 

***

 

McKay cornered John after Eliot had run out in the middle of their conversation.  John could tell from the look on McKay’s face that there was going to be complaining in spades, and John tried to head him off at the pass.  “I know you think Eliot needs a more defined plan, but really, recon comes first.  It’s a plan to get the information to make a plan, and I know how much you like getting information, so really, you should be completely on board with not going in without a plan, which I know from experience you hate-” 

“Dude,” McKay interrupted, then immediately slapped a hand over his mouth, his eyes wide with horror.  He started speaking into his hand, and John reached out to pull it away from his mouth, releasing the torrent of babble. “-od, oh my God, I can feel my IQ dropping—he’s _infected_ me!” McKay yelped, and started hyperventilating.  John tried not to laugh at McKay’s pain, but, well, it was fucking hilarious.  

John just didn’t get how most people couldn’t get along with McKay.  The man was worth his weight in naquada for entertainment value alone, not to mention the fact he regularly managed to save everyone’s lives at least once a week, _and_ could always be counted on to tell you the truth, even if it came with a heavy dose of ‘verbal irony’ (also known as sarcasm), but since McKay could take it as well as he could dish it out, John didn’t really give a shit. 

He certainly felt like his wits were sharper when he was around McKay because of it, and when you’re in charge of keeping a couple hundred people alive, sharp wits were a good thing.  There really wasn’t any better candidate for a best friend, in John’s mind, and he was kind of selfishly glad that more people didn’t understand that about McKay.  

He was only now starting to realize how much it’d actually sucked not hanging out with the guy for the better part of the last five years.  Laura and McKay had never really gotten along—or rather, they’d gotten along about as well as solid state potassium and an indoor swimming pool—and so John had let their friendship drift a little, and then a lot, especially after Laura had died and John had bumped himself off the active duty roster, and eventually all of Atlantis, with the excuse that he’d had Jesse to think about.  John was glad he’d let the Air Force bribe him into coming back, even if things weren’t the same.  

McKay was a good friend, even when John didn’t deserve it, like when he’d blown them all off after Laura died.  Maybe someday John would be able to return the favor somehow.

 

***

 

Shawn was the one to break the uncomfortable silence.  “Well, as lovely and awkward as this is, I think it’s time for you to leave now.”  Eliot felt a pang at the coldness in Shawn’s voice, and was suddenly disgusted with himself for pussyfooting around the whole feelings thing.  

Because yeah, while suddenly discovering some very repressed homosexual tendencies validated a couple freakouts in his book, making the person who made your preconceptions stand on their head feel like a shitheel was stupider than dousing yourself in moonshine and playing with matches, no matter what their gender was.  

Fuck, if John could navigate DADT for his crotchety scientist, like he _oh so obviously_ was, Eliot could brave the wilds of NOGAD (No One Gives A Damn) for Shawn.  What kind of pussy was he, anyway? 

 

***

 

Shawn fidgeted with the pillowcase tangled around the pillow clutched to his stomach, and tried not to look at Eliot.  He was uncomfortable enough as it was, what with the awkward silence, not to mention the weird staring thing Eliot had going on, and he really didn’t want to ask again, but geez, was he ever going to leave? 

Was it too much to ask for some peace and quiet in which to watch some people be murdered horribly by a crazed genetic mutation? 

“No, I don’t think so,” Eliot said decisively, and Shawn had almost forgotten the question by then.  He opened his mouth to protest, but Eliot leaned down and snagged the pillow Shawn had been clutching to his stomach (to protect it from the wicked mutant tail-knife, just in case) and lay down next to Shawn on the bed.  Eliot stuffed the pillow between the headboard and his head so he could see the TV too, and now Shawn had absolutely _no_ clue what was going on.  Because if Shawn wasn’t totally mistaken, Eliot had just brushed a kiss over his lips and was now _holding his hand_.

 

 

 

 

 **16.**  

“Okay, seriously, you need to stop with the happy sex faces,”  John muttered under his breath in the general direction of Shawn and Eliot, safe in the knowledge they were too far away—both physically and metaphorically—to hear him.  Seriously, Eliot was starting to creep him the fuck out.  Seeing the normally taciturn and stoic Tom/Eliot he’d come to know over five months on the ranch grinning like a fool on crack was seriously messing with John’s head. 

“Hear, hear,” McKay muttered at his shoulder, and John flinched, surprised to find McKay so close.  It was their third day in Dallas, and so far things weren’t looking bright on anything more than an interpersonal level.  Hardison had hit a firewall that even McKay had made admiring sounds about, and it took some serious genius to get vocal admiration out of McKay.  Though, actually, John figured that meant they were probably on the right path, especially when McKay had muttered something about the extreme unlikelihood of the Asgaard and the Goa’uld ever voluntarily collaborating on Earth-based computer security. 

“How’s the code-breaking coming?” John finally asked after a few moments, wondering why McKay was still hovering at his shoulder.  

“Oh, right.”  McKay blinked a couple times, like he was forcing away his body’s need for sleep by sheer force of will.  Which, come to think of it, he probably was—John had seen him do it before, after all.  He and Hardison had been tapping away at their laptops in a corner of the suite’s living area for—John glanced at his watch—pretty much the past 46 hours straight.  “Coffee break,” McKay mumbled after a short pause, and made his way vaguely towards the en-suite kitchenette and its complimentary coffeemaker like a sleepwalker.  

John bit back a fondly exasperated smirk.  McKay sure hadn’t changed much in the eleven years John had known him, even if he’d been absent for five of them. 

 

***

 

Shawn jumped at the wordless exclamation of triumph that filled the suite.  A quick glance confirmed it had come from the Computer Corner, and Shawn joined the rest of the crowd converging on the two hackers.  John was hanging over McKay’s hunched back, reading over his shoulder and muttering something with a feral grin on his face.  

“Looks like they finally got through,” Eliot remarked from beside him, an arm firmly around Shawn’s waist. 

“Golly gee, you think?”  Shawn snorted at the understatement and forced a grin at the man beside him.  It’d been nice, having Eliot’s almost undivided attention for the past day.  Sure, they hadn’t really done anything other than constantly invade each other’s space, but it was nice to know that they were both on the same page now.  Even if it seemed like that page was _never going to turn_.  But hey, Shawn would take what he could get.  He could be patient, and wait until Eliot was ready. 

Maybe. 

Shawn wasn’t going to let himself get in the way of the whole reason they were there, though.  And not only because he might possibly have some sort of a martyr complex.  “Shouldn’t you be like, over there planning and stuff?”  He looked over at the milling mass that had already divided off into little knots of people talking quickly and animatedly about what they should (and in one case, what they most definitely shouldn’t) be doing with this new information McKay and Hardison had gotten them.  Shawn suddenly realized that there were ten people in the room.  No wonder it’d seemed so small compared to his single, even though it was a suite.  

“Nah.  I just hit people,” Eliot shrugged, and tightened the arm around Shawn’s waist momentarily.  _Uh huh, and I’m a fairy princess,_ Shawn thought to himself, but didn’t call Eliot on it.  He wasn’t stupid, after all.  Like he was gonna _make_ Eliot stop being all cuddly and touchy and watch him be all Planny McStoic again over there with the rest of them.  Shawn suppressed a shiver as Eliot maneuvered around behind him and wrapped his other arm around Shawn’s waist as well, pulling him back against Eliot’s chest as Eliot rested his chin on Shawn’s shoulder and murmured in his ear, “Think they’d notice if we disappeared for a while?” 

“Pretty sure they wouldn’t have a clue,” Shawn’s voice most definitely didn’t crack as he tried to get the words out, leaning back into Eliot solely for the heat Eliot was radiating in the chill air of the climate-controlled room.  (Because only in Dallas would the hotel still have the central air set to ‘cool’ in February.)  It wasn’t like Shawn wanted to, you know, crawl inside Eliot’s skin and never ever emerge again, or anything. 

Shawn and Eliot ducked out of the room undetected—well, except for by John and Ronon, who both tracked their exit with knowing eyes but didn’t say anything, so Shawn figured it didn’t really count—and across the hall to Shawn’s room where they’d spent most of the previous day tangled on the bed (but not in the best way) watching pay-per-view movies and old Wormhole Xtreme reruns.  Shawn had slightly higher hopes for the type of tangling he was pretty sure was on its way.

 

***

 

Eliot manhandled Shawn through the door and threw the deadbolt, thanking whoever was listening that the hotel’s maintenance staff had replaced the doorframe yesterday.  And then he slid the chain home across the door, just in case.  At least they'd have some warning.  He eyed the air vent in the ceiling over the bed suspiciously, but there really wasn’t anything he could do about it.  It’s not like he could duct tape the armoire over it and have it actually stay up there.  He’d just have to stay alert.  

“Just, you know, making sure here-” Shawn was looking down at the shoes he was in the process of toeing off, but stopped talking with a sharp inhale when he looked back up at Eliot.  Eliot didn’t know why, exactly, but honestly, right now he didn’t really care.  

Eliot closed the distance between them with a few quick steps.  He didn’t really have any previous experience to fall back on, here, but he figured Shawn probably had enough for both of them combined, and that Shawn would let him know, loudly and indignantly, if Eliot did something he didn’t like.

 

***

 

Shawn sucked in a breath when he saw the look in Eliot’s eyes, his train of thought completely derailed.  Not that he still needed to confirm the whole _having sex now, right now, please dear god please now_ , because the way Eliot was looking at him like he was… was… something really really delicious pretty much confirmed that.  And then Eliot was _there_ , wrapping himself around Shawn and burying his nose into the place where Shawn’s neck met his shoulders and teeth, _oh god_ , nipping at the thin skin over his collarbone where the old, frayed collar of Shawn’s t-shirt gaped open…  Oh _god_.  Shawn arched his neck helplessly, and tried to strangle the soft moan in his throat, but didn’t have much success.  It just ended up coming out deeper and choked sounding and apparently that was a good thing, because yay, kissing. 

Kissing Eliot wasn’t all fireworks and trumpets or whatever, but Shawn’s whole world narrowed down to the feel of Eliot’s lips pressed against his, the smooth slick slide of Eliot’s tongue over Shawn’s lips, the rasp of Eliot’s stubble contrasting sharply to the firm softness of his lips, the hot hard solid feel of Eliot’s chest pressed against his, the tingle that followed in the wake of Eliot’s hands as they smoothed down Shawn’s back and cupped his ass, the hard ridge of Eliot’s erection pressed against Shawn’s hip through those seriously illegally tight jeans Eliot was wearing…  

So, okay, maybe it kinda was all fireworks and trumpets or whatever.  Because Shawn couldn’t have told a firing squad or a team of wild horses—though why either would want to know he had no clue, he’d never really gotten that saying—the color of the carpet or the thread count of the hotel sheets or even whether it was morning or evening or one in the afternoon.  And that was way more intense and hot and _better_ than any stupid fireworks, _ever_.

 

***

 

Eliot tasted the pineapple-flavored chapstick on Shawn’s lips, and spared a moment to grin against Shawn’s mouth.  The lingering aroma of pineapple around Shawn that Eliot first remembered noticing almost eight months ago had finally been explained the first time he’d kissed him, and it was quickly becoming his favorite flavor. 

Shawn took advantage of Eliot’s grin to slip his tongue into Eliot’s mouth and stroked it slickly across his own.  Eliot’s hands spasmed on Shawn’s ass, squeezing tightly with no input from his brain, but that was apparently not a bad thing, judging from the low groan Shawn exhaled against Eliot’s lips and the way his hips rocked into Eliot’s.  Eliot staggered as Shawn wrapped his arms around Eliot’s neck and pulled himself up that last inch or so the workboots Eliot was still wearing gave him over Shawn (now that he was barefoot), to better meet Eliot’s lips with his own, coincidentally upsetting Eliot’s center of gravity and making him stumble a couple of steps away from the bed in order to compensate.  

Moving away from the bed wasn’t in the game plan for the night.  Eliot focused on that as an easy goal to accomplish before his brains finished liquefying and oozing out his ears, and used a quick spin and thrust from his hip to send Shawn flying onto the slick duvet covering the bed—where, thankfully, Shawn didn’t slide right back off again and crack his head open on the floor or the nightstand, because that would have put a quick and fairly spectacular end to things.  A short bound landed Eliot next to Shawn on the bed, and he quickly moved to straddle Shawn and get his lips back on Shawn’s. 

Hand to God, some angel somewhere must’ve fallen just to teach the boy to kiss. 

Oh. 

Apparently he’d said that out loud.

 

***

 

Shawn pulled back with a snort of suppressed laughter, reeling too much from that statement to even care that that was probably the least attractive sound in the _world_.  “What the hell?” he snickered.  “Oh, El, the things you say to me!” he added in his little girl voice, just to make Eliot scowl.  Though maybe that wasn’t the smartest idea, considering Eliot might change his mind about the whole _having sex now please now_ thing if Shawn pissed him off—or maybe not.  

Eliot grabbed Shawn’s forearms and yanked Shawn’s hands out from under Eliot’s shirt and pinned them above Shawn’s head on the pillow with a one-handed and bone-creakingly tight grip on his wrists and proceeded to make Shawn shut up in the best way, sealing his mouth over Shawn’s.  And, wow, the almost-angry glint in his eyes and the way he was manhandling Shawn were definitely doing awesome things for Shawn’s dick.  Not to mention the fact that Eliot was straddling Shawn’s hips in those illegally tight jeans and the friction from the slow grind Eliot had going wasn’t half bad either.  Apparently Shawn had a thing for angry guys.  (Though, come to think of it, that wasn’t much of a surprise; see example A, e.g. Lassiter the Wrathful, Angry and yet simultaneously Incredibly Sexy Detective.  Not that Shawn’s thinking of him at the moment.  Just, there’s a history.)  Not that Shawn had the brain cells to spare for much thinking at the moment. 

Shawn rocked his hips up against Eliot’s and didn’t even try to smother the needy noise he breathed into Eliot’s mouth.  He didn’t care who did what (or who), but “I really, really need a hand or a mouth or _something_ to fucking touch my dick because I’m going to come in my pants from just this damned friction pretty soon and it’d be really fucking lame to have this end that soon without any actual _fucking sex_ ,” Shawn gasped breathlessly against Eliot’s lips. 

“Do you ever stop talking?” Eliot murmured against Shawn’s lips, while executing a particularly well-placed thrust with his hips. 

“Not- exac- maybe? I can’t- ‘member?” Shawn answered incoherently, his breath hitching in his throat as he tried to get the words out.  Eliot smirked against Shawn’s lips and nipped at Shawn’s kiss-swollen bottom lip before releasing Shawn’s wrists and sitting back.  God, Shawn’s dick ached, and while the pressure of Eliot sitting on his hips was nice and all—oh.  

Eliot stripped off his shirt in one smooth motion before setting to work on Shawn’s.  Oh, good.  They were finally getting naked.  Shawn was so totally down with that.  He tried to help Eliot with his shirt, but apparently hands weren’t like heads and four weren’t better than two.  Shawn’s fingers didn’t seem to want to work right and as soon as he realized he was slowing down the process of getting naked now now _now_ he stopped helping and let Eliot take care of it.  Almost as soon as he’d stopped interfering, his shirt was off and Eliot was chest to chest with him again, one hand back to pinning Shawn’s wrists over his head while the other worked at undoing Shawn’s button fly (which had to take some serious manual dexterity, because Eliot was pretty flush against him right about there but he didn’t seem to be having any trouble undoing Shawn’s fly one-handed, which promised only good things to come in Shawn’s future involving intimate contact with those nimble, _nimble_ fingers) and Eliot licked and bit at a spot high on Shawn’s neck, just under his ear.  

Shawn moaned and arched against Eliot and into his hand as Eliot finally wrapped his hand ( _nimble_ fingers!) around Shawn’s dick and stroked once firmly, the rough drag of his calluses making Shawn squirm and whine a complaint.  Eliot immediately released Shawn and sat back on his hips, the obscenely tight jeans (that he was _still_ wearing, why the _hell_ was he still wearing _pants_?) outlining only good things.  “What?” Eliot asked, looking slightly confused and maybe even a little worried.  Which was not how Shawn wanted him looking _at all_ , and he set out to fix that.  

Since Eliot was sitting on Shawn’s hips and a wriggle hadn’t any result other than Eliot tightening his thighs against Shawn’s hips so Eliot wouldn’t lose his balance (which short-circuited Shawn’s brain for a few sizzling seconds, because _accent_ and _cowboy_ and _riding_ and _hot_ ), Shawn tackled Eliot’s fly, fumbling the button through the hole and easing the zipper down carefully.  Finally, _finally_ , Eliot got with the program and rolled off Shawn to lay beside him on the bed and shove his jeans off, and Shawn took the opportunity to do the same before Eliot somehow, magically, reversed his roll and was back where he’d started.  Shawn stared.  Eliot was one of those people who looked better without clothes.  By like, a lot.  And he’d looked pretty _damn_ good in clothes in the first place.  If Eliot hadn’t been pinning Shawn’s wrists again, he wouldn’t have been able to resist the urge to touch.  Eliot’s cock twitched as Shawn stared at him, and Shawn’s gaze focused in on it as his mouth began to water.  Jesus, but dude was pretty _everywhere_.  His cock was long and red, thick enough to make Shawn’s jaw ache in the best way, and there was a clear drop of pre-come beading the slit.   Shawn’s tongue darted out and he licked his lips. 

“I want-” Shawn got out before impatience overcame him.  Words were too slow.  He slipped out of Eliot’s hold on his wrists and flipped them so Eliot was on the bottom.  Yeah, Shawn was crap at martial arts, and despite his protestations he actually knew it, but he’d wrestled all four years of high school.  Sure, it had started out as a semi-valid excuse to grope other boys in unitards, but he’d ended up learning a few tricks despite himself, and had made varsity both his junior and senior years in high school.  Though Shawn was pretty sure the only reason he succeeded in flipping and pinning Eliot was that Eliot hadn’t been expecting it.  Special ops probably beat a couple of upperclassman trophies, hands down. 

Shawn slid down Eliot’s body and dove in before Eliot could do more than thread his hands through Shawn’s hair and try to tug him back up.  With a swirl of his tongue, Shawn swept up the bead of pre-come and savored it as he trailed wet, sucking kisses down one side of Eliot’s shaft and back up the other, after a brief detour to nuzzle Eliot’s balls.  Eliot’s hands on Shawn’s head stopped trying to pull him back up and just alternated between clutching at his hair (not too hard, thankfully, because he’d be _so_ pissed if Eliot snatched him bald) and smoothing against the curve of his skull.  When Shawn reached the head of Eliot’s cock again, he dropped his jaw and took him deep without any fanfare. 

Eliot gasped something that sounded almost like Shawn’s name and bucked his hips, driving his cock deeper down Shawn’s throat.  Shawn relaxed his throat and angled his head a little differently, and Eliot slid easily (well, not precisely easily, but not painfully either) the rest of the way down Shawn’s throat.  Shawn moaned as Eliot fucked his mouth, and fumbled a hand down to his own dick, stroking himself quickly.  He wasn’t going to last, _god_ , not with Eliot doing _that_.  God, he couldn’t think of anything hotter—he shuddered and moaned around Eliot’s dick when he came, and Eliot’s head shot up and stared down at him incredulously.  When Shawn met Eliot’s eyes, he knew he looked dazed and wrecked and his mouth was still stretched around Eliot’s cock and it was pretty obvious he’d just come while Eliot fucked his mouth.  Eliot stared at him a couple of seconds longer, pupils blown so wide his eyes looked black and bottomless, then dropped his head back with a low groan as he started to shoot down Shawn’s throat, his cock pulsing against Shawn’s tongue.  Shawn caressed the head with his throat as he swallowed repeatedly around it before finally pulling back to catch the last shot in his mouth and on his lips.  

He waited until Eliot was looking at him again to swallow his last mouthful and lick his lips clean as he crawled up Eliot’s body to kiss him.  Eliot’s cock twitched against Shawn’s thigh as he pressed his lips against Eliot’s, and Shawn grinned against Eliot’s lips when Eliot took control of the kiss and rolled Shawn under him, though he knew they probably weren’t going to do much more than kiss before dropping off to sleep, or maybe lazily explore each other’s bodies.  They weren’t teenagers, after all. 

Then again, they had _months_ to make up for.

 

 

 

 

 **17.**  

The increasingly loud ranting from across the hall was disturbing Eliot’s post-coital lethargy.  From what he could make out, it seemed to be variations on the theme of “Wrong, wrong, oh so very wrong!  What are you, a _moron_?”  He tried to ignore it, but it just kept getting louder.  Finally, with a scowl, he started disentangling himself from Shawn’s blissed out imitation of a clingy octopus.  The guy was out like a light, and while Eliot envied his ability to sleep through whatever was going on, it wasn’t enough to regret the fact that Eliot’s SERE training and field experience had forced him to become a light sleeper.  After Eliot managed to slip out of Shawn’s embrace without waking him, he grabbed his pants from the floor and stepped into them (zipping up extremely carefully), before heading across the hall to bash someone’s head in. 

Eliot thumped his fist on the door and glowered at the peephole until someone opened it.  He pushed past the bemused Sophie and stalked angrily towards the source of the ranting.  Nate was apparently the one McKay had been yelling at, not Hardison like Eliot had suspected, and he stopped scowling at and trying to bluster over McKay as soon as he caught a glimpse of Eliot bearing down on them, eyeing Eliot with confusion.  McKay didn’t even seem to notice that certain doom was heading his way, or that Nate had stopped fighting back, though his ranting had quieted down some now that he wasn’t trying to talk over Nate. 

John stiffened almost imperceptibly as Eliot got closer to McKay, and John’s team seemed to take their cue from him and ease into combat-ready slouches (that they’d probably learned from John) at the perceived threat to their teammate.  Eliot’s own team just looked stunned and confused.  Except for Parker, who was bouncing in place, but then, Eliot had never really been able to explain Parker anyway.  

Eliot reached McKay and manfully resisted the urge to punch the asshole in the face.  John’s guys (especially the woman, she looked the most dangerous of them all) would probably put him in the ground if he did.  So instead, he grabbed McKay’s shoulder and swung him around to face him, which thankfully cut off the increasingly repetitive monologue.  Eliot couldn’t decide between ‘Shut the fuck up, already,’ or ‘If you keep yelling our plans at the top of your lungs, we won’t have to find Moreau, he’ll have found us.’  The first was nice and succinct, but the second was more likely to get the guy to stay quiet.  So he picked door number three and just glowered at the guy, crossing his arms over his bare chest and trying to ignore the fact that he practically reeked of sex.  

McKay focused on him as Eliot spun him around and almost swallowed his tongue, he stopped talking so fast.  He blanched as he gave Eliot a once over, and Eliot didn’t care if it was because of his shirtlessness and the obvious hickeys or if it was the way he probably looked like he wanted to rip McKay’s head off and shove it down his exposed windpipe.  Which he kinda did.  But at least the guy had stopped fucking yelling.  “Think you could keep it down?” he ground out, almost affably, making McKay’s eyes jerk up from Eliot’s bare chest to meet Eliot’s eyes. 

McKay blinked at him and opened his mouth to answer, no doubt with some scathing insult pretending to be an answer, so Eliot glared him silent before he said a word.  McKay finally just nodded weakly, more color flooding back into his face than had left, making him look apoplectic.  Eliot jerked his head once in what might be loosely termed as a nod, and turned on his heel to stalk back out of the room and across the hall to where Shawn’s grabby octopus arms were waiting.  

“Think you could teach me that trick?  Be nice to know how to shut McKay up once in a while,” John asked in a loud stage whisper from across the silent room when Eliot had almost reached the door to the hall.  Eliot glanced at John over his shoulder as he opened the door, saw the smirk, rolled his eyes and shut the door behind him.  

The ranting started up again, this time directed at John, but at least it was quieter.  Eliot couldn’t even hear it after he’d shut the door to Shawn’s room.  He shucked his jeans quickly and eased back into the bed beside Shawn, welcoming the sleepily questing arm that wrapped around him as soon as he slipped under the covers, and shushing Shawn’s murmured “Where’d you go?” with a kiss. 

Shawn murmured something incomprehensible, and wrapped himself around Eliot again before settling back into his doze.  Eliot wished he could join him, but his skin was still buzzing with adrenaline from the confrontation across the hall, even though it had been nothing more than the equivalent of telling the neighbor kids to turn down the music.  Most of the adrenalin, Eliot was pretty sure, had come from outing himself, and the nature of his relationship to Shawn, to that entire room as well as if he’d yelled it from the fucking rooftop.  And he hadn’t given a flying fuck what they’d thought about it, which was just…  He shifted against Shawn until he was the big spoon, nuzzling his nose into the crook of Shawn’s neck, and stroked Shawn’s flank absentmindedly as he wallowed in the knowledge that Shawn wasn’t going anywhere without him anytime soon.

 

***

 

Shawn woke up slowly from a dream that closely resembled the movie _Cat People_ , minus most of the plot and plus a lot more porn, but the blissful sensation of being petted remained, long slow strokes down his side that started at his ribs and stopped right above his knee.  Shawn pushed up into the next stroke, wishing he could purr, his full cock dragging against the starched hotel sheets, and a hard weight pressing a line of scorching heat along the cleft of his ass.  Shawn murmured in pleasure and ground back against Eliot’s cock, and Eliot’s hand stuttered on its path from Shawn’s ribs to his knee.  Mmm, Eliot.  That’s right, they finally…  Shawn shifted against Eliot again, trapping Eliot’s cock between his thighs, and lazily brought Eliot’s stroking hand up to Shawn’s mouth to lick and suck at two of Eliot’s fingers.  

He was pretty sure they’d manage to keep themselves occupied somehow, at least until the geniuses in the other room had a breakthrough.

 

***

 

John had never been very good at being patient.  Or at watching other people do the work while he just sat on his ass feeling useless.  But there wasn’t much he could do to help, especially now that McKay had banned him from “hovering over my shoulder like some kind of demented shoulder devil.  Yes, I know you’re good with numbers, and even though this is way beyond anything you would have learned with your Master’s degree in Applied Mathematics, I promise you I’ll call on _you_ to check my numbers if I run into a problem.  Until then, Sheppard, get out of my bubble or I will stab you in the eye with my _laptop_ ,”  McKay told him calmly, his stress gradually creeping though his calm words until his voice rose to a yell on ‘laptop.’  McKay spared a wary glance at the hotel room door, obviously nervous about the prospect of the sweaty, half-naked Eliot’s return, but then turned gimlet eyes on John until John relented and backed away with his hands up in mock surrender.  

If there was one thing he’d learned in Afghanistan, it was to snatch sleep whenever possible, because you never knew when you’d have to stay up for days in a row in the future.  So John retreated to the armchair that was simultaneously closest to the geeks on their computers and farthest from the majority of Eliot’s team.  He spared a fond thought for Jesse and the inevitable havoc his son was wreaking in Atlantis before he shut his eyes and drifted into a light doze.  

John wouldn’t say he trusted Eliot’s team, but he didn’t specifically distrust them either.  Still, waking up with the blonde cat-burglar perched on the armrest of his armchair and staring at him intently from less than half a foot away wasn’t something he was really comfortable with.  He started with surprise and his hands slapped at his chest in an attempt to raise his non-existent P-90 (while Teyla and everyone—except Ronon—were right, and it would have been ridiculous to lounge around in the hotel decked out in full tac gear and strapped, John would feel a lot more comfortable if she’d just let him wear his Glock, or even his Baretta) in response to the perceived threat.  

“If McKay can’t kill me with his mind, and believe me, he’s tried, I really doubt you can, so please stop trying,” John drawled at Parker as soon as his heart rate had started descending towards something approximating normal. 

“Genius, here,” McKay muttered vaguely from the computer-covered coffee table he and Hardison had set up at, complete with the usual incomprehensible hand gesture, right on cue.  Though John highly doubted McKay had any clue what John had even said, other than the brief mention of his name. 

Parker just blinked and smiled at John, and no, that wasn’t creepy at all.  After about another half minute or so of intense staring, something distracted her and she grinned over her shoulder at the front door.  John couldn’t see what she was looking at because her crouch obstructed his view, but Eliot’s voice coming from that direction wasn’t much of a surprise.  “Parker, what-  Stop tormenting John.”  Eliot half-laughed, and John rolled his eyes. 

“It’s not like she had me tied to the chair or anything,” he muttered to himself as Parker bounded across the room to wrap Eliot and Shawn—freshly showered, from the looks of their damp hair—in a giant bear hug.  

John took the opportunity offered and effected a strategic retreat, going back over to the computers to hover over McKay’s shoulder again. He was pretty sure he wasn’t gonna fall asleep around Parker again.  Discretion was the better part of valor, and all that.  He scrubbed his hands over his face and through his hair in an effort to wake himself up more fully, and peered at the equations on McKay’s computer.  “Shouldn’t that be phi^17 instead of phi17?” he asked, plastering a smartass smirk on his face when McKay stared up at him with furrowed eyebrows.  

Sadly, McKay just corrected his oversight and didn’t launch into the rant of epic proportions that John had been hoping for.  Maybe McKay needed more coffee.

 

***

 

“Hey, Parker,” Shawn grunted as she tried to squeeze him in half—or else maybe try to physically combine him and Eliot into one person with only the force of her crazy strong arms.  He wasn’t sure what her goal was, here.  “Why so grabby?”  He rasped, not gasping for air after Parker released them, but only because he was too busy talking through his abused throat.  

“You broke the scientist,” Parker scowled momentarily at Eliot before brightening again, “so it’s been really really quiet and _boring_.  But now you’re back!  And will you please remind Nate that I—we—broke the Stahrenko before, so the As-goa’uld thing will be cake?”  

 _As-goa’uld?_   Shawn mouthed at Eliot with raised eyebrows.  Eliot shrugged.  Apparently they’d missed something.  Shawn decided not to ask about the broken scientist thing. 

John came sauntering over from where he’d been hanging over McKay‘s shoulder and pointing at things on the laptop screen, though he kept a wary eye on Parker until she tossed him an amused look and headed over towards Sophie and Nate.  “As-goa’uld?” Shawn asked him curiously, glad that the sore hoarseness was starting to fade already.  John raised one eyebrow and Shawn totally and completely resisted to urge to cry out _Spock!!_ with fannish glee.  Seriously.  _Vulcan._  

“We’ve found the building Moreau’s in,” he explained, then elaborated.  “It’s a Trust skyscraper in Houston--Moreau’s in the penthouse on the top floor, and the rest of its offices and businesses, most of them shell companies of Moreau’s and some he uses for money laundering that are mostly above book, though there’s also a couple of legit businesses based out of there that don’t have any affiliation with him.  Thing is, the biggest business in there is Ad Hoc Security, and they obviously do the security for the building.” 

“Let me guess,” Eliot interrupted, “they’re one of his shell companies or something.” 

“Well, they’re Moreau’s,” John hedged, “but they’re legit.  And good.  We think he’s using some of the… stolen government lab tech stuff… bringing it mainstream through them?” 

“Oh my _god_.”  Shawn couldn’t take it anymore.  “You know you’re like, the worst liar slash confidential information non-sharer ever, right?  Do they even normally let you tell people stuff, like, _ever_?” 

John glared at him.  Sure, the power of John’s eyes couldn’t _really_ peel the flesh from Shawn’s bones—but Shawn edged slightly behind Eliot anyway.  Though he caught the quick quirk of John’s mouth that translated loud and clear as ‘No, never, actually.’ 

“So the bad guys control the building and have access to some super top secret government gadgets and weapons that they’re gonna use to try to kill us when we break in.  That it?”  Eliot asked bluntly, distracting John and saving Shawn from more glaring. 

“Well… Yeah, pretty much,” John blinked at Eliot.  

Eliot shrugged.  “Not much different than usual, then.”

 

 

 

**18.**  

John slouched in the supremely uncomfortable desk chair and thought wistfully about just throwing himself out the window.  Or a few select other people.  The planning of the assault on Moreau’s fortress had been going on for far too long.  John had lost his patience with the endless talking about three hours ago, and yet, Eliot’s team kept coming up with more and more absurd and over-complicated strategies that John had to keep shooting down.  The last few, though, he’d let McKay have a crack at, since the man was practically shaking in his seat with bottled up frustration at the sheer idiocy of some of the ‘plans’ Eliot’s guys had proposed.  At least John could take comfort in the fact that none of the stupidity had been coming from Eliot—it would have been disheartening to realize at this late date that he’d left his son in the care of a man who thought rappelling down the side of a fifty story building in full daylight would go unnoticed by the general public. 

At least now that he’d sicced McKay on them, John didn’t have to pay as much attention to the talking and was free to stare out the window and remember fondly the days when the most complicated plan John had to deal with was ‘kill the goddamn Wraith before it gets its fucked up life-force-sucking hand on you’.  (Though even John had to admit that even those had been in short supply after the first month or so in Pegasus.)  But at least now, with McKay fielding the suggestions, John was no longer as tempted to yell at the idiots until they curled up in a fetal position or until his lungs collapsed, whichever came first (though setting people on fire had been a really close runner-up on John’s new list of ‘ways to discourage stupidity‘), now that he didn’t have to explain _why_ the stupid-ass plans were stupid—McKay must be rubbing off on him.  Though McKay actually enjoyed yelling until his lungs collapsed, unlike John.  He always felt like he was channeling his first DI, whom he actually still had nightmares about—even after encountering the Wraith, which said something. 

The knock on the door put a temporary halt to the endless talking, and John suppressed a groan of relief and tossed a grateful look at the door.  He didn’t even care who was on the other side.  He’d rather deal with a Jehovah’s witness—hell, he’d rather deal with the IRS—than listen to any more of this crap.  

“McKay, did you order room service _again_?” he asked with feigned resignation when McKay got up (from the one comfortable-looking chair in the whole room, the bastard) to answer the door.  John had always grabbed every opportunity he could to wind McKay up, because it’d been the best entertainment to be had in the Pegasus galaxy; now it was just a habit John didn’t particularly feel like breaking. 

“Hypoglycemic, Colonel.  You’d think that if there was actually a brain under all that hair, you might actually remember something I‘ve been reminding you about for, oh, the past five or ten _years_ ,” McKay snapped. 

“Yeah, yeah,” John muttered under his breath, smirking.  “We wouldn’t want you to pass out from manly hunger.” 

McKay just glowered darkly at him as he crossed the room to open the door, perhaps a little irritated that John chose to remember _that_ facet of his hypoglycemia.  McKay opened the door to a bellhop (or whatever they were called these days) who had him sign something and then handed him something else that John couldn’t really make out from his angle.  McKay shut the door in the kid’s eager face, either not noticing or choosing to ignore the outstretched hand waiting for a tip.  McKay returned from the door looking slightly bemused, a manila envelope in his hands.  “I didn’t think food came like that,” Ronon commented from across the room. 

“Well, obviously it doesn’t and this isn’t food, Conan,” McKay rolled his eyes, “It‘s probably a waiver they want me to sign saying I won’t sue the next time they try to poison me with citrus-”  McKay broke off after looking down at the envelope.  “Oh.  Obviously they know better than to try.  If they send me up one more dish with a side of lemon…” he trailed off and tossed the envelope in John‘s lap as he crossed back to his (comfortable) chair, flipping his tablet back into his hands and getting absorbed in what was either an epic game of minesweeper or a new plot to take over the galaxy.  It was always kind of a tossup with McKay. 

John eyed the manila envelope in his lap suspiciously.  It was addressed to him, personally, and that in itself was strange.  No one knew he was in this hotel, let alone back in the States.  Everyone but Atlantis and the rest of the SGC thought he was in Afghanistan, and why the SGC would be sending him couriered mail…  He didn’t recognize the handwriting addressing it to him, and there was no return address.  

It probably wasn’t a bomb, seeing how whatever was in the envelope wasn’t much thicker than a sheet of paper or two.  But then again, he worked with some of the best minds of his time—and McKay had pissed most of them off at one time or another—so it would be foolish to rule anything out.  But still, mailing John a bomb to hope McKay was caught in the back-blast was a little over the top, even for the paranoids who worked at Area 51.  

The thought of such a complicated and delicate bomb triggered a sharp pang of loss deep in John’s chest, and the memory of Laura’s smug exuberance as she laid the charges for the heart-shaped blast pattern of a Hive cruiser, just because Markham and Stackhouse had bet her she couldn’t do it.  Laura would have been able to make something small enough to imitate a sheet of paper in a manila envelope but have the power to level half the hotel they were in, easy.  She would’ve also laughed while making it, her carefree chuckle with that bright, encompassing smile that had always made John forget what a fucked life he’d had before she’d finally just ignored his protestations about fraternization and the UCMJ and bullied him into a relationship.  

But she was gone now, had been for five years now, and it was just John and Jesse left. 

With a fatalistic shrug, John ripped open the top of the envelope and slid out the single photograph that comprised its contents.  John’s jaw clenched.  

Frankly, he would have preferred the bomb.

 

***

 

Shawn had never seen anyone in a murderous rage before.  Until right now, he’d thought he had.  He’d spent five plus years harassing Lassiter and pulling his pigtails, and thought he knew what that red flush and slight tightening of the skin around the eyes and the abortive movements towards his gun had meant.  But no.  That had just been pissed off.  

John’s face was blank and his eyes looked like dead, inert glass in his face.  It was, quite frankly, severely creepy, and Shawn suppressed a shiver as the skin crawled on the back of his neck.  He didn’t know what had made John look like that—wasn’t sure he _wanted_ to know, even, though it was pretty much a sure bet he was going to find out anyway—but it was obvious, at least to Shawn, that if John had never killed in cold blood under orders he most likely wouldn’t have that expression now, the severely creepy one that implied that behind those dead, emotionless glass eyes he was calmly and methodically eviscerating and vivisectioning someone with his mind in slow and very painful steps.   And Eliot, the guy Shawn was very deeply in like with, was no doubt capable of making the same lovingly detailed and deeply disturbing plans without remorse if he had just cause.  Yeah, that didn’t make Shawn nervous at all. 

Finally, John looked up from the photograph and fixed McKay with that blank stare.  The movement caught Shawn’s attention and shattered his train of thought into a million pieces.  Thankfully.  Without removing his eyes from McKay, John stepped close enough to Eliot to hand over the photograph—not fumbling at all, even though he wasn’t even looking—and put his hand up like he was gonna tap at the radio in his ear, but he held off for a moment, looking almost human again as he opened his mouth to say something to McKay.  But then the dead eyes came back and John didn’t say anything to McKay before he tapped his radio into life.  “ _Daedalus_ , one for Atlantis.  Priority one.”  John disappeared in the flash of light that Shawn was getting disturbingly used to.  But… Atlantis? 

Shawn thrust the reference to the mythical city out of his mind for the moment (John talked to something or someone named _Daedalus_ , after all.  He bet Atlantis was another code name, just one slightly less lame than a guy who locked up poor deformed children in mazes for other people to kill), and edged into Eliot’s space to catch a glimpse of the photo that had so distracted Eliot that he hadn’t even looked up at the flash of light that accompanied John’s disappearance. 

And now it looked like Moreau was threatening him. 

Yeah, Shawn kinda understood John’s whole cold-blooded murderous rage thing now. 

McKay had been typing viciously on his laptop while Teyla and Ronon glowered at the picture and Eliot’s team huddled rather bewilderedly across the room.  Shawn hadn’t known it was possible to type viciously, but now he knew better.  McKay muttered something under his breath that Shawn couldn’t quite hear, before snapping out “What do we need?” in an oddly flat tone.  

Shawn had no clue what he was talking about, or who he was even talking to, but Eliot immediately snapped back, “C4.” 

“Additional ammunition, perhaps stunners,” Teyla supplied. 

“Ropes,” Parker input helpfully from across the room, though Shawn was pretty sure she didn’t know what they were talking about either. 

“Lorne,” Ronon stated succinctly.  Shawn wondered what the hell a Lorne was.

 

***

 

As soon as he’d been beamed into Atlantis’s gate room, John left it at a run, ignoring the questions and shouts that had followed behind him until he’d hit the first transporter.  He had to find Jesse.  He knew Atlantis would keep his son safe, but he had to make sure.  John would never be able to live with himself if something had happened.  Though if, god forbid, if it did, John would make damn sure to live with it long enough to make sure whoever was responsible most definitely didn‘t. 

Jesse was safe and sound though, and the sight of him terrorizing the infirmary under Keller’s benevolent eye cracked the ice of John’s flash-frozen heart; seeing that photograph had felt like all the blood in his veins had been supplanted by liquid nitrogen, and John honestly couldn’t remember feeling his heart beating since then until now as it thundered against his ribs hard enough it felt like it was trying to jump out of his chest.  John retreated back into the hall and braced himself against the wall next to the infirmary door, dragging air into his lungs in gasps that just barely managed not to be sobs by dint of excruciating self control.  

Luckily, the halls were empty; no one was around to witness their commanding officer’s breakdown.  After what felt like forever, John pulled himself together and forced himself to walk away from the infirmary without greeting his son.  He didn’t want to worry Jesse, and god knew the kid always managed to pick up when John was hiding something from him.  It had to be something he got from his mother.  Jesse would be safe on Atlantis, and happier if he didn’t know John was here, at least for the moment. 

John headed immediately to his own office once he’d pulled himself together.  After so many years, he knew his second in command pretty damn well, so finding him taking advantage of John’s absence to tackle the mountain of paperwork that used to be John’s desk wasn’t even a surprise.  “Sir,” Lorne greeted him without surprise, standing up from behind the towering stacks that were threatening to topple at any moment.  John eyed them warily.  

“We share a rank now, Lorne, you don’t have to keep calling me sir,” John reminded Lorne testily and took the printout Lorne handed to him, momentarily sidetracked by the threat of being crushed to death by paperwork.  There was a reason John didn’t like his office.  Times like this, it was fucking scary. 

John ignored Lorne’s rightful insistence that he did, in fact, have to call John sir, seeing as John was military commander of the mission, as well as because John had time in rank, tried unsuccessfully to ignore the death by paperwork looming over his head, and scanned the printout Lorne had handed him.  Good.  Lorne obviously knew what was going on.  The printout was an email from McKay to John, c/o Lorne.  It was a bulleted list with the heading ‘Everything we need to completely destroy Moreau and the lives of everyone who’s ever worked for him, ever, for goddamn daring to even look at J.J.’  John thoroughly approved. 

John returned to the hotel in Dallas bearing five big black duffels, Evan Lorne and the rest of AR-2.  

Lorne had had almost everything ready to go by the time John had found him, and so he’d spent less than an hour total on Atlantis.  John still wasn’t sure what he (or Lorne) had said to Woolsey, but the civilian director had allowed him to take the equivalent of several naquadah bombs, half the armory, and the acting military commander away from Atlantis.  Whatever it had been, it’d worked.  He just hoped he hadn’t accidentally instigated a mutiny or something.  (Most likely, though, Lorne had probably just told Woolsey that Moreau had threatened Jesse.  If he’d said it once, he’d said it a million times—Jesse had all of Atlantis wrapped around his little finger.)  The very last of the items on McKay’s itemized shopping list of destruction had been a penciled-in addition from John himself, and so while it had taken them over five hours of flight time to get to Dallas, they hadn’t needed the _Daedalus_ to beam them back.    

 

 

 

 

 **19.**  

It had been a tense night.  Shawn had shrugged off the sight of John getting beamed up—again—in hopes of impressing someone with his experience.  Or, well, in order to look cool and blasé about it.  Or both.  But the two minor breakdowns and Parker’s gleeful and non-stop comments on how very _useful_ it would be to be able to do that had kinda ruined his plans for the evening.  Well, not plans, per se, not after that spine-chilling look on John’s face and the way Eliot’s face had been on the way to the same expression, though Shawn had been faintly hoping that maybe Eliot would want to work out his frustrations in the bedroom…  But no such luck.  Eliot had spent the rest of the night nurse-maiding his team through their various reactions to the stupid goddamn (but still really cool) beaming technology, along with Hardison.  Shawn had wanted to help, but after Eliot had snapped at him, oh, twelve too many times, Shawn had said the hell with it, fairly emphatically, and went back across the hall to his room.  

It wasn’t like Shawn thought he was in the middle of one of Chief Vick’s romance novels or anything—he and Eliot were just two horny guys who’d fucked and hadn’t had a supremely awkward morning after.  This wasn’t some torrid steamy romance some hack had cooked up to sell books.  Eliot was…  God.  So obviously not head over heels the way Shawn was.  He just really needed to get a grip on himself and stop with the transference.  

Because while, yeah, he could totally understand why Eliot wanted to get naked with him, Shawn had also always known that this whole thing had never been going to last.  Shawn was a drifter and Eliot seemed to live a string-free existence, so they were doomed to fail from the start; never mind the fact Shawn hadn’t yet seen a happily ever after in real life with his own two eyes.  So it was better to not even try, right?  Besides, it wasn’t like he was blind.  He’d seen Eliot pull a giggling Parker into his room late last night (while Shawn was totally getting a Fanta from the vending machine and not stalking in any way, shape or form).  So Shawn had locked the lid down hard on the raging jealously surging in his chest and drank himself to sleep on the contents of the mini-bar, pretending so hard it all hadn’t really meant anything more than getting off that he’d almost believed it right before he passed out.

 

***

 

Fifteen hours after John had been picked up by the _Daedalus_ ’s Asgaard beam, he was knocking on the door to the hotel suite he’d left.  Jumper One was safely cloaked on the roof of the hotel, with the majority of AR-2 sacked out in its cargo bay.  John figured they’d be heading out in less than an hour, anyway. 

A grim McKay opened the door after John knocked a second time, scowl pulling the line of his lips more crooked than usual.  It took a moment, but McKay apparently finally registered that he was looking at John and Lorne, and stepped back from the door, swinging it farther open so they could enter the suite.  John figured McKay was probably pre-coffee, considering it was roughly 0500 local time.  He did a quick mental revision of his time-table—it was probably going to be more like two hours before things got moving, two if he was lucky, that was.  

McKay shuffled in the general direction of the en-suite kitchenette and its absurdly tiny coffeemaker.  Teyla and Ronon were already up, thankfully, so John left Lorne to their tender mercies and exited back into the hall to start banging on doors.  The quicker he got everyone moving, the quicker Moreau was going down. 

 

***

 

Eliot stumbled to the door and wrenched it open.  John was on the other side, fist raised to pound at the wood again.  He smirked tightly at Eliot and said succinctly, “Heading out at 0700 local.  Saved you for last.  Get ready and get your team’s asses in gear and meet us on the roof.”  John did a sharp about-face and marched back down the hall to his team’s suite.  Eliot didn’t know who had shoved the stick up John’s ass—except for the whole asshole threatening his kid thing, so yeah, the comfort of strict military routine could probably be a welcome preventative measure to just losing it, he supposed—but it was a surprise to see that someone actually taught zoomies military time and crisp about-faces at that day-camp they called OCS.  Eliot scrubbed a hand across his face, wincing at the drag of stubble, and admitted to himself he was getting a little catty in his old(er) age.  Not that he had anything on John, not yet.  At least the grey striping John’s temples was still at least ten years in Eliot’s future.  

He watched John stride back to his suite and enter before Eliot finally shut the door to his own room in bemusement, still comparing zoomie OCS to the hell he’d gone through in RIP as he booted Parker off the foot of his bed where she’d curled up, catlike, to sleep a couple of hours ago when he’d finally talked her down from trying to ‘acquire’ the ‘fancy glowy magic beam maker thing.’ 

Eliot kicked Parker out of his room and told her to shower and get ready, because they were leaving in an hour and a half, and that yes, she could take any (or all) of her gear she wanted.  He figured that extra half hour would give him time to either talk her into consolidating or figure out how to carry all the crap she thought she needed.  Eliot wasted no time on his shower and shave, pulling his hair back into a quick ponytail and slapping a watch cap over it.  He didn’t know if they were going in under the radar or guns blazing, so he threw on a pair of jeans he could move easily in and a dark tshirt that wouldn’t be easy to grab onto for someone trying to reel him in for a fist to the face.  Boots on and kit-bag on his shoulder, he was out the door less than ten minutes after he’d kicked Parker out.  He started towards John’s suite, but made a last second detour to see how Shawn was doing at getting ready. 

 

***

 

Shawn tried to ignore the pounding on the door again, but just like the last time, it didn’t work.  He made his bleary and world-hating way to the door, trying not to move his head and wobble free the hangover headache he seemed to have lurking in one corner of his skull.  He knew it was just waiting until he stopped paying attention to it before it pounced and chowed down on his brain and central nervous system.  Shawn’s stomach lurched at the vivid imagery that accompanied that thought, and he pulled open the door in an attempt to distract himself from the revolt currently roiling in his esophagus.  He was expecting it to be John again, and that Shawn would have to try to coherently explain—again—why he was totally unnecessary and would likely be really unhelpful and in the way, being so scared of guns and all.  It was a good excuse, better than ‘if I see Eliot I’ll try to punch him for cheating on me even though we’re not really together and he’ll pull me apart at the seams for trying and I really don’t want to experience that,’ even if it was a total lie.  Shawn’s fingers had been itching to play with John’s P-90 ever since he’d met him (in a way that wasn’t even a euphemism for sex, sadly). 

But instead of John’s fist pounding on his door and poised to land the next one right in his face when he opened it, Shawn opened the door to see Eliot looking fucking edible in a painted-on tshirt, worn soft black jeans, and that damn watch cap that he actually made look good.  Not to mention the combat boots which did entirely inappropriate (and definitely incomprehensible—he’d never had a thing for boots before this) things for Shawn’s dick.  Eliot even had a duffel bag slung over his shoulder in just the right way to make his bicep bulge and his shoulder muscles do very good things to the line of that latex-masquerading-as-cotton t-shirt—he looked like the proverbial ‘hero going off to war’ with a huge dash of bad boy thrown in.  Shawn groaned and thumped his head against the edge of the door, immediately regretting it as it dislodged the headache from the corner behind his eye and it started pounding through his skull.  He groaned again, but this time with pain instead of lust and slash or an unwelcome upwelling of his very teenaged girl-like crush on said antihero.

 

***

 

Eliot dropped his kit-bag to the floor in the hall and eased his way into Shawn’s doorway, gentling a hand around the back of Shawn’s neck.  He sounded like death warmed over, and looked just about as good.  “You okay, man?”  He asked in concern, but all he got in reply was another pained sound and a feeble push off of Shawn as he turned to stumble back to the bed and hide his head under a pillow.  Then Eliot saw the scattered mini-bar bottles and his concern quickly made an about-face of its own, shifting into annoyed exasperation.  He’d spent the night soothing Nate and Sophie back into coherence and trying to follow Parker’s leaps of logic while Shawn had apparently drunk himself into a stupor.  Yeah, he wasn’t really feeling any pity at the moment.  

“We’re heading out in an hour and a half, and I _will_ dump you into an ice-cold bath if you’re not in the shower in ten minutes,” Eliot stated overly loudly to the room.  Just to make sure Shawn could hear him through the pillow, of course.  Eliot went as far as the hall to bring his kit-bag into the room and shut the door, sitting with his back against it and watching Shawn on the bed. 

Shawn made a growly noise and let one edge of the pillow slip up until he could peek out from under it and see Eliot.  “’m no’ going,” he said, words muffled by the pillow but still understandable.  

“What do you mean, _you’re not going_?”  Eliot wasn’t precisely flabbergasted, but his irritation was reaching new-found levels of pissed off.  First the jackass drank his way through Eliot’s night of babysitting hell, and now he was going to call it quits right when they went after the guy who’d fucked up their lives in the first place?  Like hell he was.  It‘d been less than a minute, but Eliot didn‘t care.  “Ten minutes are up,” He forced out through clenched teeth, and pushed himself up from his seat against the door and was across the room before Shawn had even so much as twitched in reaction.  Pulling Shawn off the bed and upright, he bent down to slam his shoulder into Shawn’s midsection and lift him up into a fireman’s carry, hoping the jackass wasn’t far gone enough to puke on him.  

Shawn must have gotten it all out of his system earlier though, because the only thing he started spewing was curses as Eliot carried him towards the bathroom.  Cuss words Eliot hadn’t heard since his time in the military were coming out of Shawn’s mouth, and that and the wriggling Shawn was doing against Eliot’s shoulder while he attempted to get free combined to give him a really inappropriate and badly timed erection, but whatever.  He was a grown man, so he could keep it in his pants when he needed to.  

Eliot maneuvered his way into the bathroom and flipped the cold water on in the shower.  He even managed to do it without Shawn’s contortions over his shoulder pulling him off balance.  With a grunt, he dumped Shawn in the tub under the freezing spray.  Eliot scowled at him when Shawn made like he was going to get right back out of the shower, and Shawn scowled right back.  He stayed in the tub though, and if he turned the hot water on high enough to make a cloud of steam billow out of the shower, Eliot didn’t particularly care.  It’s not like he wanted Shawn hypothermic, just moving.  “I don’t know what the hell you’re on about,” Eliot began as Shawn started stripping off his sodden clothes.  Shawn gave him a brief startled look around the shower curtain he’d not pulled completely shut before realizing that Eliot’s comment was unrelated to his stripping, “but you’re going.  I’m not letting you get away from me again, number one,” Eliot barreled on, ignoring the startled, and just plain weird, look Shawn threw at him, because Eliot figured he was probably better off not knowing for the moment.  “And number two, we need all the help we can get to take out this bastard.  I- You need to be there.  You’ll- I don’t want to have to do this again.  Finish up in here and get your shit together, I’ll be in there packing for you.  We’ve got maybe half an hour or so before I figure John wants to brief us, and then we‘ll head up to the roof to look things over before the rest of them are ready.”  

“ _We’re_ going to look things over?” Shawn asked pointedly, sounding about as pissed off as Eliot had felt when Shawn had told him he wasn’t going.  “What am I gonna do, stand there and look pretty so you can _concentrate_?”  There was definitely nothing pretty about that tone.  Was more like a snarl than a tone, actually. 

“Yes, _we_.” Eliot scowled at him, and reached around the half-shut shower curtain with one arm to shove Shawn against the tiles of the shower, holding him there while he glared at him, ignoring the spray from the shower that was now soaking his whole right side.  “I don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with you right now, but I want you to look over the gear and see if you see any worn spots or crap knots or whatever the fuck else is wrong with it, considering I don‘t even know what John‘s brought us yet.  Gotta get some use out of seeing _everything_ , right?  ‘Specially if it means we all might live a little while longer.” 

Shawn relaxed at that for some reason, the strung-wire tension of his body easing into something a little more normal.  Eliot wasn’t sure why telling him he was going to use him for his skills was making him relax rather than the frankly embarrassing revelation that Eliot didn’t want to lose him again, but it was something he’d think about later, when he had the time and energy to spare, and not right before a mission that could kill them all pretty damn easily. 

Not much later, Eliot was watching Shawn’s hands fly as he stripped down, checked and reassembled a P-90, and he had to swallow the lump in his throat.  Not only was Shawn fast, he was good.  No pinched fingers, no fumbled springs—it was like he was a part of the machine in a way Eliot had never seen from a civilian.  It was also fucking sexier than anything he’d ever seen before.  “Oh, I am so _definitely_ living through this,” he muttered to himself, and was startled when Shawn glanced over at him with a surprised grin.  So much for talking under his breath. 

“Oh, come on, El,” Shawn chided, that weird look that’d been in his eyes since Eliot had barged into his room this morning fading a little, “you haven’t even seen me shoot yet.  I was winning the adult-level rapid fire competitions when I was _eleven_.  Henry bought me a pistol for my eighth birthday, and started teaching me to shoot at the police range when I was five.  I had to stand on a box to see down the lane.”  Eliot swallowed again, looking away from Shawn’s too-knowing eyes.  He really hated being predictable.  But there was no way in hell he could not like a gun in Shawn’s hands, because the man definitely knew what to do with one.  No, no ignorance there.

 

 

 

 

 **20.**  

So, Eliot had a gun kink.  How… well, predictable, considering he was some infamous hitman or something.  Eliot probably couldn’t wait to see the crazy blonde with a gun.  Shawn figured it was probably a good thing that Eliot had never seen Jules go all badass on someone—or even seen Jules at all.  Because Shawn really didn’t need _that_ complication in his life.  

Shawn stubbornly ignored the awkward silence between them, filling his mind with the details of the guns he was checking, disassembling and reassembling them repeatedly to keep his hands occupied and clenching his jaw to keep from talking.  He probably shouldn’t have called Eliot on the gun kink thing, but passing up the chance to brag about 1) a real, not made up, genuine skill and 2) maybe shoot up past the blonde in Eliot’s estimation, was pretty much impossible, even though he was still kicking himself for it.  Fuck, he was pathetic.  

For a while, the clicks and clatters of the parts in Shawn’s hands were the only sound on the rooftop.  He was really starting to regret not sneaking out in the middle of the night and heading back up to South Dakota, or maybe down to Malibu, as soon as he’d seen Eliot drag the blonde into his room—even though he’d only just thought of that option.  But, no, Eliot probably would have gone all crazy-stalker-person on him again, and he’d be dragged back before he could blink.  Or at least catch a decent wave.  Because according to the monologue Shawn had been treated to this morning in the shower, while Eliot was apparently free to tap other asses, Shawn wasn’t allowed to do _anything_ , ever.  Crazy, obsessive, hot stalker.  Who was really fucking with Shawn’s head, with this silence.  He was going to explode into a torrent of words soon, he could just feel it, unless something distracted him.  Hopefully it’d be the arrival of the others and their subsequent talking.  They were waiting for the rest of the strike team—and the fact that Eliot had called the collection of misfits a strike team was fucking laughable—to assemble on the roof.  He didn’t understand why they were meeting up here, unless they were waiting for a helicopter to come pick them up, because there was nothing on the roof but Shawn, Eliot and the pile of gear that they were both sorting through and looking over while waiting for everyone else.  

Shawn could actually kinda get why Eliot had asked him to help, even though it was obviously a big fat excuse to keep an eye on him.  He hadn’t discarded anything so far, but had managed to point out a weak point on one of the vests that Eliot had fixed with duct tape, of all things.  He supposed that even if he didn’t find anything wrong, the fact that there were two people (one of them with super-special observational skills) looking over the gear that could be the only thing between someone and death could probably be a good thing.  

Eliot straightened up from his crouch over the stack of already-inspected (about a billion times, now) tac vests and looked over at the roof access door just as Shawn heard the barely-there squeal of it opening (okay, so make that two people with super-special observational skills, then) and twisted around to look for himself.  John and his team filed out, the rest of Eliot’s people straggling out after looking that much more disorganized for following the soldiers (or whatever they were). Thank god.  Finally.  Shawn would be able to stop biting back the words that kept wanting to escape, now, if someone else would just start talking, like, now. 

Instead though, once John got within easy speaking distance of Shawn and Eliot and their pile of goodies he stopped walking and pointed behind them with something in his hand.  Shawn twisted to look at the empty area behind them automatically, even knowing it was the oldest trick in the book, his mouth already open to say something to the effect and hoping that was all that was going to come out—and gaped in dumbfounded astonishment as a … _thing_ … shimmered into existence before his disbelieving eyes. 

 

***

 

The oohs and aahs were the same as they always were.  John really should have known better than to have higher hopes for Terrans than he had for the Pegasus natives, considering how many times they’d proven him wrong since he’d learned that the Pegasus natives even existed.  Point in fact, the Pegasus natives were usually less impressed than John’s fellow Earthlings were.  John waited impatiently for the confused and amazed babble to die down after he uncloaked the Puddlejumper with the remote.  McKay just rolled his eyes and went in to roust Lorne’s team from the Jumper, neatly avoiding the dumbass comments some of the civilians were making.  John wished he had it so easy.  After a few minutes, John got tired of waiting for the babble to die down.  Every second longer this took was another second that bastard who’d threatened Jesse got to live and, not incidentally, make plans and contingencies to hurt Jesse.  The quicker he died, the happier John would be.  Because screw the paperwork, Moreau wasn’t going to live to see another sunrise if John had any say in the matter—and he had the only say that mattered. 

“Enough!” John raised his voice to cut over the excited talking.  Surprisingly enough, they all shut up and looked at him.  Guess that tone (Bill had called it his ‘mom voice,’ which was something John just refused to react to, on principle) worked as well on adults as it did on a four year old determined to fly from the hay loft doors.  As soon as he’d gotten their attention, McKay came back out of the Jumper and took over.  John didn’t really care who was doing the talking, as long as they got moving soon, and it’d probably be over quicker with McKay browbeating them into obedience than with John trying to explain.  He already had his gear on, so he jogged over to the Jumper and started his pre-flight while McKay talked down to the civvies. 

“Yes, yes, it’s all very exciting, I’m sure,” drifted faintly into the front of the Jumper through the two open hatches, and John smirked wryly as he brought up the HUDs and made sure they were good to go as soon as McKay and the rest of the Atlantis personnel herded the civvies onboard.

 

***

 

Eliot tuned out McKay as soon as he said the word ‘spaceship’ and forced down the thrill of excitement that welled up from his inner child, instead focusing on the gear and deciding who’d get what.  There would be plenty of time afterwards to geek out about it like Shawn was currently doing, interrupting McKay every few seconds with comments like ‘So it goes into space, right?’ and ‘So he’s really a real Vulcan, then?’ and, “Shut it,” Eliot muttered to Shawn with a hard bump of his shoulder to grab Shawn’s attention.  “Annoy him after.  Help me get the civvies kitted up.”  Shawn looked at him with a weird expression.  Eliot supposed it was because he’d excluded Shawn from the ‘civvies’ category, but Shawn had geared up while they were checking over the equipment, and for all he’d never been in the military or on the force (to the best of Eliot’s knowledge), he seemed familiar enough with it all.  Eliot shrugged, dumped a couple of tac vests in Shawn’s arms, and shoved him off in Parker’s general direction.  Not that he thought his emotionally adopted and really annoying younger sister would wear one (too many things to catch on other things, he could already hear the complaints in his head), but it was worth a shot.

 

***

 

Shawn felt his eyebrows try to crawl past his hairline when Eliot ordered him to go ‘kit up the civvies,’ whatever that meant.  Geez, give the guy a pile of camouflage and he starts speaking a foreign language.  Then again, it wasn’t like it was that hard to translate.  Shawn passed out the straptastic bulletproof vests to whoever he ran into, getting nods of thanks from Teyla Emmagen (of Athos) and Dreads (of the Scary Yet Hot People planet, whose name Shawn still couldn’t (or refused to admit that he did) remember, even though he’d been introduced and corrected like five times already), and absentminded complaints from the rest of them.  

He seriously considered not giving a vest to the people-tasering, boyfriend-stealing evil little blonde Parker-thing, but ended up smacking the last one hard enough into her stomach that she grunted, and glared at her until she put it on over her bitching.  He’d rather win or lose fair and square and not because he’d maneuvered her into getting killed, thanks to those damned annoying morals Henry had managed to install in him sometime during his fucked up childhood.  Once the vests were gone, he passed out the rest of the gear, except the guns, figuring Eliot would know who should get one (and who should definitely not) better than Shawn would.  

He pretty much tuned McKay out as soon as he realized that he wasn’t going to say anything important, though he kept half an ear out anyway.  Just in case.  Everything was handed out, and he was bored and fidgeting with strap that clipped the P-90 to his vest when McKay finally started herding them all into the Jumper.  

Shawn leaned against the bulkhead connecting the cargo bay to the cabin, careful not to touch anything, and waited for majority of Eliot’s team to get settled.  He was impatient to get this whole stupid thing over and done with, so he could get the hell away from stupid gorgeous stalker cheating Eliot.  He’d heard McKay say something about ‘inertial dampeners’ during the spiel, so figured he’d be just as good standing as sitting, and was vindicated when about half the military contingent stayed standing instead of sprawling on the bench seats of the back half of the ship.  The new goons John had brought back with him stayed in the back with the rest of them when McKay and Teyla and Dreads joined John in the cockpit-cabin thing.  Shawn kept as many people as possible between him and where Eliot was sitting next to the evil blonde, ignoring the weird looks Eliot kept shooting at him.  

Leaning into the bulkhead separating the two areas afforded Shawn with a really freaking cool view of the cabin and the windshield.  The windshield seemed to be one of those giant see-through glass monitors that were cropping up so often in movies nowadays, and through the incomprehensible diagrams and graphs and stuff that filled the screen Shawn could see the city of Dallas falling and twisting away as they rose up and turned towards the far-off glitter of what Shawn supposed was the Gulf of Mexico.  McKay was definitely right about those inertial dampeners, because Shawn didn’t feel his balance shift at all as they turned and gained altitude, let alone when the horizon seemed to shoot towards them.  

 _Ten freaking minutes_ later, Shawn was gaping through the windshield at the Houston skyline in astonishment.  Mentally thanking his high school physics teacher for leaving the equations on the board year-round, Shawn did a quick and dirty calculation in his head and realized they’d been traveling upwards of Mach 3.  With no accompanying increase of Gs inside the Jumper, or audible sonic boom.  Shawn steadied himself with a hand against the bulkhead of the _alien spaceship_ , something he was only now starting to really believe, even with all the bright lights and invisibility cloaks and pointy ears that’d been going on ‘round here.

 

***

 

John cued his radio to transmit through the speakers in the cargo bay and laid out the plan, mentally nudging the volume up a couple notches when someone—Nate, he was pretty sure—tried talking over him and suggesting alternative, ‘better’ courses of action.  “No,” John finally responded in exasperation, since ignoring and talking louder than Eliot’s boss was obviously not working, “We’re not going to steal the goddamn building!  We’re not going to fucking steal anything.  Let me say it again: we are going in and extracting the target by any means necessary.  If extraction isn’t feasible, the target will be eliminated.  And by we, if you don’t shut it and listen and fucking do what I tell you, I won’t mean you.  You can sit in the Jumper with the windows cracked and wait, instead.”  Nate shut up, finally.  

John refrained, with a huge effort of will, from banging his head against the Jumper’s front console.  Why the hell had he even brought the civilians with them?  What the hell were they going to do to help?  This wasn’t an extraction, it was a fucking assassination, if John was going to be honest (at least with himself).  There was no way he was bringing that piece of shit back to Atlantis.  Not while Jesse was there. 

 

 

 

 

 **21.**  

Of course their destination was the tallest skyscraper in the Houston metropolis.  At least that made it easy to spot from the air, what with the giant ‘Ad Hoc Tower’ signs plastered over the windows of the upper five stories on all four sides of the building.  Even though they were evil corporate drones, Shawn couldn’t help but pity the people who worked in those offices.  It had to bite the big one that their view consisted of the back of a giant sign. 

John parked in a narrow space between two air vent cap things, about as far away from the helipad as he could get and still be on the roof.  It looked like it couldn’t possibly fit, but John set the _spaceship_ down without the tortured shriek of rending metal, so apparently it did.  John had obviously left the cloak on while they were flying, as no F-16s had come screaming down at them to bomb them out of the sky, but until he took that final step off the edge of the ramp, he could still see the rest of the ship.  There was less than an inch of clearance on either side of the ship sandwiched between the droning vent caps; Shawn was impressed despite himself.  More so, though, when he stepped off the ramp and the spaceship disappeared between one heartbeat and the next—but not because of the magically disappearing spaceship.  As soon as he’d left the field of the cloak, which Shawn was starting to think had been a pretty stupid move as none of the others had left yet or were watching while he did, someone shouted and Shawn felt something punch him in the chest hard enough to send him staggering back right before he heard the sharp crack of a gun firing.  

So, yeah, maybe being first off the boat wasn’t such a good thing.

 

***

 

Eliot swore at the shouted “Don’t move!“ that came from across the roof and whipped around to look in the direction of the shout, the low-voiced conversation on entrance strategies ending abruptly when a gunshot rang out.  Eliot’s heart jerked in his chest as he watched Shawn stagger back with a wheezing grunt and raise a hand slowly to his chest. 

“Guess going in quietly is out,” Eliot half-heard John mutter behind him, but the only thing he could focus on was the fact that Shawn hadn’t fucking moved.  He was still standing there like a big ol’ target just waiting to get shot.  Again.  Eliot dove out the rear hatch of the cargo bay, knocking Shawn to the ground and rolling with him until they fetched up against the base of one of the vent caps.  It wasn’t the best cover, but it was all that was available at the moment.  Even if the thin aluminum wouldn’t do much more than slow down a bullet, at least the shooter couldn’t see them now. 

“What the fuck was that?” Eliot hissed at Shawn, but didn’t wait or listen for an answer.  His heart was pounding with adrenaline now, rather than fear, as he leant out from behind the cover of the cap and squeezed off a lucky shot in the gunman’s direction that winged the guy and got him to dive for cover behind a vent cap of his own. 

 

***

 

“I wiped the footage and took out the security cameras, but someone had to have been watching that,” McKay announced barely a minute after Eliot had dashed out of the Jumper after Shawn.  “I give it maybe two minutes before we’ve got company up here, if that.”  

“Two minutes.  I can work with that.” Ronon rumbled, and ghosted out of the back of the Jumper.  Less than a minute later, he was back with the wounded, scared as shit, babyfaced gunman in tow. 

“My backup’s on the way, they’ll-” he interrupted himself with a scream as Ronon shoved his thumb into the redly oozing hole in his right shoulder.  John just smirked at the guy.  Ordinarily he might have felt a little sorry for him, especially since the kid looked so damn young, but at the moment all John felt was the cold rage that had settled itself indelibly inside him when he first received the picture of his son from Moreau.  “You fuckers!” The guy sobbed, “I’m gonna-” he broke off with a sobbing gasp when John stepped up beside him and squeezed his right shoulder mock-comfortingly. 

“No offense, but if you were a threat, you’d already be dead,” John commented mildly.  He waited patiently as the kid gasped and dry heaved with pain from the friendly squeeze, before those young eyes focused on him again.  Good, it looked like he had his attention now.  “Now, you’ve got an opportunity here,” John broke out the earnest voice that’d always worked on Elizabeth when he’d been younger and less fucked up.  “You can be useful and help us out and we probably won’t kill you.  Or you can keep being annoyingly unhelpful and we’ll definitely kill you, though I might give you to the big guy here to play with a while first.”  He squeezed the guy’s shoulder again and ignored the way McKay’s face was turning a sickly shade of green up front in the cockpit.  John would use the tools that fell into his lap to accomplish his mission, regardless the cost.  

It wasn’t like he was going to let the guy live after seeing the inside of the Puddlejumper anyway, seeing how the kid worked for the Trust and all.  McKay would just have to deal. 

John didn’t let Eliot’s reentrance to the bay of the Puddlejumper distract him from his interrogation as the ex-Ranger pushed Shawn up the ramp and shoved him onto one of the benches lining the walls, unfastening Shawn’s tac vest briefly to check for broken ribs while he talked quietly and fiercely to Shawn who just glared back at him.  Lorne’s team quietly poured out of the Puddlejumper to secure the roof while John asked his questions and got his answers.  He also got some blood on his hands; what was a little more, after all, when he’d been steeped in the stuff his whole career?

 

***

 

“What the hell, Shawn?”  Elliot hissed as he eased the loosened tac vest away from Shawn’s torso enough to slip his hand up under it and feel for the tell-tale warm wetness of blood or the give of a broken rib.  “Does this hurt?” he continued without waiting for an answer to his first question.  Shawn grunted in response, but didn’t gasp or whimper when Eliot pressed against the area beneath where the bullet was embedded in the vest, so he figured Shawn’s ribs were probably only bruised, maybe one or two cracked at the very worst.  He’d live.  “Seriously, do you have a death wish?  What the fuck was that, wandering out in the open like that?  Are you _trying_ to give me a heart attack?” he muttered half under his breath as he straightened Shawn’s vest and started tightening the straps he’d loosened to check for broken bones.  “Because you’re gonna, if you keep scaring me like that.  I can’t fucking lose you again, you’re too important,” he continued, not paying attention to what was coming out of his mouth as he strained to hear the conversation between John and the guy who’d shot his Shawn.  “I don’t want to lose you now that I’ve finally-” Eliot stopped talking abruptly as he clued in to what was coming out of his mouth.  Not to mention Shawn was glaring at him like he wanted to knock off his head.  

“Back the fuck off.  I’m not a _girl_ ,” Shawn growled as he pushed Eliot away, though he shot a half-fearful and entirely respectful glance at Teyla as he said it, who was ignoring them completely as she spoke intently to a green-tinged McKay up front.  Eliot felt pretty morbid for the snort of laughter that surprised out of him, considering the soft-core torture going on about five feet to his left, but it was too much. Teyla was all the way up in the cockpit while Shawn was sitting not three feet from Parker and Sophie; whose presence Shawn hadn’t even acknowledged, let alone their possible responses to his slander of their species as a whole.  

Shawn tightened his tac vest with accompanying pissed off muttering under his breath, and thoroughly checked over the P-90 hanging from his chest to make sure it hadn’t taken any damage from the gunshot or the subsequent rolling around on the ground.  If he happened to clench his jaw tighter and obviously choose to ignore the pained sounds that were coming from not very far away, Eliot didn’t blame him.  It’d been a while since he’d had to have the stomach for what John was engaged in, after all, and some of what was going on was making his gut clench in sympathy.  In his past, Eliot had done and had done to him a million times worse than what John was inflicting on the shooter, but it’d been a long time since he’d been on either side of the torture game, and he wasn’t looking to change that any time soon. 

It’d been over McKay’s two minutes for a while now, and while there was still no sign of the gunman’s prophesized backup on the roof, John seemed to have gotten all the information he needed.  There was a short, soft sound that Eliot tried not to catalog even though he knew it by heart, and Ronon brushed by them cradling the limp body of the gunman to his chest with unnecessary care and set it gently down off to the side of the rear hatch; out of the way, but still within the active area of the invisibility cloak.  

John stopped by Eliot on his way out of the cargo bay and informed them tonelessly after tapping his radio to make sure everyone could hear the plan, “Moreau should be in his office on the fifth floor down.  McKay’s managed to keep anyone from twigging that we’re up here yet, but we don’t know when the guard’s scheduled check-in was so we’re going in hot and hard, while trying to plug up their communications so we can keep the element of surprise.  Lorne and his team are taking the east stairwell; you two, Teyla and I are taking the west stairwell; McKay and Ronon will have our backs up here with the rest of your team—except the blonde, who I’m pretty sure has already gone in through the vents.  She’s going to hit the safe room for me while we’ve got Moreau occupied.”  With that cryptic statement, he strode briskly off down the ramp, leaving Shawn and Eliot to scramble after and try to catch up before he reached the roof access door, Teyla following silently on their six.

 

***

 

John and Teyla ducked into a likely looking door on the fifth level down.  This was the third office suite they’d checked since hitting the correct floor but it was taking longer than expected to find Moreau, due to the fact they’d started meeting opposition the second floor down from the roof, and so someone had probably warned their mark and he was in hiding.  The other team was still stuck on the floor above, but from the sounds of the sharp clatter of the P-90s that overpowered the slower cracks of handgun fire and the fact they hadn’t radioed for assistance meant they were probably holding their own.  

The four of them appeared to be the only ones on this floor at the moment, and since Shawn figured that probably wouldn’t last very long, knowing his luck, he decided to take advantage of the brief moment of downtime and get something straight with Eliot. 

Shawn shoved Eliot up against the wall, pissed and a little horny and maybe a touch pathetically in love with the ass, but mostly just pissed.  “You can’t fucking do shit like that,” he hissed at Eliot, shoving off of Eliot with a push that cracked the back of Eliot’s head against the wall.  Eliot just stared at him with confused eyes, and didn’t even make like the knock against the wall had hurt even a little, and didn’t fight back.  And that just pissed off Shawn even more.  

“I can’t do shit like what?” Who knew Eliot was such a good actor?  He sounded completely clueless.  But then again, Shawn had seen him slip into half a dozen different personas easy as second skins on him in the accumulated time he’d known him, so maybe it shouldn’t be such a surprise. 

“Shit like telling me I matter to you and trying to kiss me after spending the night with the evil blonde,” Shawn gritted through his teeth, ignoring the fact that his face was flaming with the embarrassment of talking about his feelings.  He was so not the girl.  Except for maybe now, when he apparently was.  He crowded back into Eliot’s space to raise his testosterone levels and stave off the urge to burst into tears like a 12 year old girl.  “I’m not some fucking twink that you can tap whenever you’ve got a spare hour or two and feel the urge.  So fuck off, asshole, and stop knocking on my door.  And don’t follow me when I blow this popsicle stand, either.” 

Eliot stopped looking confused, and pushed him back with a shove on his shoulders, following through until it turned into Eliot pinning him against the opposite wall of the hallway.  “Okay, first off,” Eliot growled into his face, sounding oddly enough like he was disgusted and trying to fight the urge to laugh at the same time, “I think of Parker like a sister.  An annoying as all hell, clinically insane, bratty younger sister.  Just like I think of Hardison as my brother.  And even if, God forbid, I wanted to go there, they’re both disgustingly head over heels for each other, and just too chickenshitted to do anything about it.”  

“I seriously doubt chickenshitted is a real word,” Shawn muttered to cover his confusion. 

“And secondly,” Eliot paused, and then brushed his lips over Shawn’s in a chaste, dry kiss that still set Shawn’s nervous system on fire and jumped his heart and other organs into overdrive in ways that were entirely inappropriate, given their current situation.  Eliot took a slow breath, then continued in a harsh whisper, his face beginning to flame as bright red as Shawn’s, “Secondly, you’re not the boss of me.  If I want to kiss you—which I do—and tell you you’re important to me—which you are, even though I probably won’t say it that often—and follow you to the end of the world if you try to run—which I goddamn _will_ so you better just fucking accept it—it’s gonna happen.  Unless you give me a really fucking good reason why not, right the fuck now.” 

There wasn’t really much Shawn could say to that, other than- “Duck!” he hissed, as he caught a glimpse of the barrel of a gun edging around the corner of the hall.  The middle of a firefight probably wasn’t the best place to be having this conversation anyway; they could finish this up later. 

John and Teyla bust out of office they’d been sweeping for Moreau with superior timing, able to get the drop on the gunman with little effort.  He didn’t fit the mold of the rest of the security force, older and slightly overweight, the gun in his hand trembling imperceptibly to anyone but Shawn, and nervous sweat sheening his forehead.  Shawn figured that they’d either found their man or Ad Hoc Security had drastically lowered their fitness requirements after hiring the rest of the goons they’d met up with previously.

 

 

 _Five minutes and some inspired use of duct tape later…_  

Teyla glared at the man taped to the office chair with murderous eyes, but Moreau just snorted in contempt.  “Am I supposed to be afraid of your designated warrior princess?” 

“I would be, if I were you.  She scares the shit out of me; gives me goosebumps.  Just look at the hairs on the back of my manly hairy hand,” John drawled, lifting a hand briefly from his P-90 to twiddle his fingers at Moreau like he was showing off a manicure in the least ‘manly’ action Shawn had ever seen from him in their short acquaintance. 

Shawn barely managed to restrain the urge to point and shriek _Geek! Supergeek! Oh my god, Vulcan Doctor Who **geek**!_  He did, however, calmly agree, “Yeah, you should totally _fear her_.” 

John briefly cocked an eyebrow at him in acknowledgement before turning back to Moreau, leaving Eliot staring at Shawn mildly from behind his stoic warrior mask and Teyla ignoring them all in order to attempt to dismember Moreau solely with the power of her mind, judging from the look in her eyes.  Shawn just shrugged at Eliot and readjusted the aim of his P-90 so the red dot of his laser sight rested right below the bridge of Moreau’s nose, right where the man could just see it if he crossed his eyes.  Which Moreau promptly did.  And Shawn did not giggle.  Because now was not the time for giggling.

 

***

 

John ignored Shawn’s snickers and addressed Moreau.  “Damien—can I call you Damien?” He paused, waiting for an answer, and smiled a shark’s grin at Moreau when he remained silent.  “I’ll take that as a yes.  Damien, you threatened my son, and for that, I’m gonna kill you, extra hard.  But first…” he trailed off and let his hand fall from the stock of the P-90 and down to the sheath on his tac vest.  He freed his KA-BAR and flipped the knife casually into the air, catching it by the hilt right after it had begun to slide into the muscle of Moreau’s thigh.  “First, we’re gonna have a little chat, just you and me, while my friends here make sure we aren’t disturbed.”

 

 

 

 

 **22.**  

“Colonel Sheppard,” the voice echoed in the room like the wrathful, if tinny, voice of God-with-a-big-G.  It startled Shawn into paying attention to his surroundings again, rather than focusing in on John and his shiny knife with the bright red blood on it and the incessant mantra of _Is he- he won’t- he’s not really going to- shit, yes he is_ running through Shawn’s head while he tried to suppress hysterical and inappropriate giggles.  Because holding a gun on a guy being tortured was so far outside Shawn’s experience that his only recourse was hysteria. 

While he wasn’t watching, the bland office had changed.  The walls were a dull grey metal, as were the ceiling and floor, and the room was completely barren except for the four of them, Moreau, and the chair Moreau was duct taped to.  All in all, the room gave off a vaguely submarine-ish vibe, which probably wasn’t helped by the small hatch-like door with the wheel thing in the middle of it (which, honestly, was something Shawn had though Hollywood had made up out of whole cloth, but apparently not.  Or else someone’s interior decorator had seen way too many WWII movies).  

And, son of a _starfruit_ , that meant he’d totally missed being beamed up.  Shawn scowled.  Life was just so not _fair_.

 

***

 

It took Colonel Caldwell’s voice coming from the overhead speakers in the _Daedalus_ ’s Transit Room for John to realize that they’d been pulled out of the Trust’s skyscraper.  “Mother _fucking_ \- Teyla!” he roared, whipping around to pin his glare on her, ignoring Caldwell for the moment.  She was the only other person who’d been in the room with them who had the clearance to call for an extraction.  She met his gaze calmly and didn’t flinch as he stalked towards her.  “What the hell were you thinking?  I had it handled,” he hissed at her, not quite under his breath.  

“You do not need to become that man again, John,” she told him firmly in response.  “I can see the path you are traveling down, and it is no longer necessary.  Jesse needs his father back, not vengeance.  Do not take his father from him again,” she warned him with that ominous voice that meant there’d be hell to pay if he didn’t listen.  John glared at her, but flung his KA-BAR down in disgust, ignoring the sound of the bloody blade skittering across the brushed steel flooring until it came to rest in a corner of the barren room.  She was right.  As much as he hated it, she was right.  He’d rather die and leave Jesse an orphan than be that guy again. 

“It wasn’t your call,” he snarled at her.  Just because she was right didn’t mean he had to like it.  She only smiled tightly at him in response, her unspoken _Yes, it was._ ringing loud in the silence between them.  

“Colonel Sheppard!” Caldwell shouted over the Transit Room’s intercom, sounding like he was losing what little patience he’d had to begin with.  John didn’t know how many times Caldwell had tried to get his attention, but it was apparently one too many. 

“Colonel Caldwell,” John replied through gritted teeth.  

“Sheppard, just what the hell have you stirred up?” Caldwell accused, and John clenched his jaw on the response that wanted to escape.  “Last I heard, Colonel, you were supervising while civilians gathered information.  I’d appreciate it if you would explain to me how a fact-finding mission requires extraction from a firefight.”  Caldwell sounded about as happy as John felt at the moment. 

John really just wanted to tell Caldwell just where he could stick his explanation, but despite—or maybe because of—the fact they were now equal in rank, he managed to restrain himself.  Steven Caldwell and he weren’t exactly the best of friends, but that didn’t give him leave to take his shit out on him.  “Things went FUBAR in Houston, and I’ve got men down there still.  I’d appreciate it if you’d send in some support or extract them.” 

In John’s experience, the commanders who did well in a crisis were the ones who stayed calm and collected when the shit hit the fan, and Caldwell was one of them.  John respected him for that, even if he didn’t like the guy.  “Sending down two squads of Marines for backup; Charlie and Tango, they’re on channel two.  Let your guys know friendlies are incoming.”  

John tapped on his radio and filled Lorne in, letting him know which channel the Marines were on and arranging to rendezvous in Dallas after the cleanup.  “And Sheppard,” Caldwell added after John had finished appraising Lorne, “I expect you to tell me just what the hell I just got myself into by helping you.  Report to the bridge-” 

A sudden movement from Moreau’s chair caught John’s attention, and he focused in on it just in time to see Eliot shove Shawn out of the way of a Zat blast and tackle Moreau and his chair to the ground.  “Goddamn it,” John swore, leaping to pull Eliot off Moreau and deliver a well-placed kick to the head to take the Trust operative temporarily out of commission.  “Colonel, I might be a few minutes.  I’ve got a Trust operative down here that needs babysitting, as well as two civilians that probably need to sign non-disclosure agreements before they leave the Transit Room.”  

John glared down at the now unconscious Moreau and offered a hand to Eliot to help him to his feet.  “What kind of guy keeps a disintegration ray gun tucked down the front of his pants?” John muttered to himself, reaching down to grab the Zat off the floor once he’d pulled Eliot to his feet.  Eliot shrugged and smiled tightly at him.  

The unfamiliar expression rang warning bells in John’s head.  Before he could even open his mouth, though, Eliot cold cocked him in the face while John was still crouched down to pick up the Zat, knocking John to the floor on his hands and knees, the Zat sliding out of his hand to bump into Eliot’s feet.  Eliot snatched it up and aimed it at John while John was still shaking off the punch.  Eliot held the Zat on him while he freed John’s Barretta from John’s thigh holster, flicking the safety off with his thumb before aiming it at Shawn.  

“El?” Shawn’s voice was full of confusion and fear, but John didn’t take his eyes off Eliot to see how Shawn was coping.  Movement registered in John’s peripheral vision and Eliot took the Zat off John just long enough to send Teyla crumpling to the floor.  A wave of relief washed briefly through him at the fact that Eliot had only shot Teyla once—she was still alive.  But the relief was soon replaced with cold fear, because there was only one possible explanation that John could think of for what the hell was going on.  When Eliot had tackled Moreau, he’d been in close contact with the operative for an extended period of time while he fought to get the Zat away from him.  John swept his eyes over Eliot, searching for- there.  Shawn said something, and when Eliot turned his head to look at him John caught a glimpse of the red line of an old-looking wound on the back of his neck, partially obscured by Eliot’s ponytail.  Except that Eliot hadn’t had a mark there earlier.  

Great, just great.  Not only was Moreau a child-threatening monster, he’d been a snake-head too.  And now the poor guy that’d probably lived a pretty decent life before a snake took over his body was brain-dead, and Eliot was playing host to the thing that had threatened Jesse. 

And, oh, right.  The snake was on a spaceship with weapons that could probably destroy Earth if applied correctly.  And it had hostages. 

So, really, there was only one option.  Even if the snake-head killed him for it, he could take comfort in the fact that the damn snake wasn’t going to get his hands on Jesse, because John knew Colonel Steven Caldwell well enough to know Caldwell would blow the ship before letting a Goa’uld take it.  “Caldwell, Moreau’s snake just took over one of my civilians.”  Eliot whipped around to fix him with glowing eyes and John felt the Zat blast fill his body with its horribly tickling pins and needles as he slumped down to join Teyla on the floor.  The last thing John heard before the darkness of unconsciousness swept over him was a gunshot.  But it was too soon for the cavalry to be there yet.

 

***

 

Eliot watched helplessly from a corner of his brain as his finger pulled the trigger of the alien gun, shooting a blob of crackling light at John, watching as it killed him like it had Teyla, screaming soundlessly while the other presence in his mind laughed with joy at his grief.  

If it weren’t for the fact that he was handling the alien gun as if he’d used it countless times before, he’d suspect he’d finally just snapped—just like Jake had 10 years ago, after that mission in Columbia—but psychotic breaks didn’t impart skill with unfamiliar weaponry.  Not to mention he remembered the snake burrowing into his neck in excruciating detail.  

Eliot screamed and ranted and cursed to no effect, struggling against his mental prison, trying with every ounce of willpower to take his body back when Shawn’s face filled his field of vision.  He fought, and he failed.  Eliot watched his own hands tuck away the alien gun and raise the Berretta, aiming for that place right between Shawn’s eyes that marked a perfect headshot.  He listened helplessly as his own voice told Shawn goodbye, and felt his finger squeeze the trigger. 

And Eliot rejoiced fiercely when Shawn’s face hardened and fiery pain exploded in Eliot’s right shoulder.  Eliot’s finger squeezed the trigger reflexively, but Shawn’s shot had thrown off Eliot’s aim, enough that the bullet impacted Shawn’s vest-protected chest instead of his forehead.  Shawn grunted at the hit, and all Eliot felt was pride when Shawn stepped forward and cracked the butt of his P-90 against Eliot’s temple as blue light crackled between them. 

 

***

 

Shawn woke up in a hospital bed, surrounded by blank white walls that just screamed ‘infirmary.’  His limbs were screaming at him with pins and needles, and his whole chest felt like one big bruise.  The tingling sensation was probably from being shot with one of those alien stun guns, he figured.  He definitely knew why his chest hurt.  He was never going to whine about Kevlar again, regardless of how hot or heavy it was or how unnecessary it seemed.  He made to sit up and groaned, immediately aborting that plan.  “What the hell is it with people and shooting me?” he asked the empty air rhetorically.  There was a rustling over to his side, and he rolled his head over far enough to see Eliot in the next bed over, looking back at him.  Shawn froze, unable to take his eyes off Eliot as his fight or flight instincts shrieked inside his head. 

“Hey,” Eliot said hoarsely, and Shawn relaxed slightly.  It wasn’t the weird booming bass from before, which might not mean anything, but.  But.  Eliot’s eyes weren’t cold and flat and dead anymore, either.  Shawn relaxed slightly.  Whatever the fuck had happened, Eliot _seemed_ to be himself again.  

Still, Shawn couldn’t make himself say anything back.  He offered Eliot a fake-feeling smile, and returned to staring up at the ceiling.  Eliot didn’t try to get him to talk again, and the silence quickly grew awkward.  But, really, what do you say to someone who may or may not be your boyfriend-type person who’d shot you and tried to kill you while being possessed by an alien?  Heloise wasn’t very helpful in this situation.  Shawn made a mental note to write her a letter of complaint.  After a few more minutes of awkward silence, tingling in his limbs started to fade.  He was really getting tired of finding new and different ways to get tasered.  Speaking of which.  He rolled his head back to find Eliot still watching him and fixed him with a glare.  “I blame you.”  Eliot blinked at him in mute surprise.  Shawn just talked over him when he opened his mouth to protest.  “Every time I get tased, you’re there.  _Every single time_.  And that’s three times so far in less than a year—less than a month, really, if you don’t count when we weren’t in the same state, which I don‘t.  What the hell, dude?  Stop it.” 

“Stop what?” Eliot rasped in confusion. 

“Getting me tased,” Shawn glared at him, trying not to grin, “or you’re sleeping on the couch for a week and not getting head again for, like, ever.”  Because while they still had to finish that earlier conversation, Shawn was pretty sure he knew now how the rest of it was gonna go. 

Eliot opened his mouth to say something, then paled as someone cleared their throat.  Shawn turned to focus on the bald and uniformed person staring at them.  The military types seemed to like their stoic expressions, Shawn had noticed.  This one was looking especially stoic as he shot Shawn a glance and turned to face Eliot.  “Eliot Spencer?  Colonel Steven Caldwell.  I’m happy to report the extraction was successful, though the doctors say your neck and upper spine will likely be sore for a while, and not to move too much if you don’t have to.  Now, I know the symbiote wasn’t with you very long, but we have a few people who’d like to talk to you and see if you remember anything useful.  Sometimes the symbiotes unintentionally share information with their hosts without realizing it, and the debriefing will help determine if that happened with you, and whether anything you may have learned could be useful to us.  One of our psychologists will drop by to talk to you tonight, and we’ll schedule a debriefing when the infirmary releases you.”  With a sharp nod, the uniformed person turned to leave.  Eliot’s face was still white as chalk for some reason, though.  And then the uniformed person turned around and added with a smirk, “And son?  You’re not in the military anymore.  We no longer give a flying fuck where you put your dick,” before leaving.  

Eliot turned bright red.  Shawn stifled a snicker.  Oh, yeah.  Eliot was himself again.

 

 

 

 

**23.**

_Earlier…_

Eliot woke up screaming.  The back of his neck, his spine, his skull, they burned.  The pain was so intense he could almost feel his skin sizzle as the fire lapped at it, could almost hear the drip of his flesh falling to the floor as the acid melted away his nerve endings.  He felt the rawness of his throat as he gasped for more air to scream with once his lungs were empty, and while it was negligible and almost unnoticeable compared to the agony of the rest of it, it was a clue to how long he’d been screaming before regaining consciousness.  He started to be able to make out other voices underneath his own, though it took him much longer to recognize words within the overlapping sounds of people shouting at each other over that broken, inhuman wail that Eliot realized was coming from him. 

“Dear god, how the hell is he still screaming?!  The morphine should have-” 

“Can’t you shut him up?! I can’t even think-” 

“If something went wrong with the extraction-” 

“It’s not like we can gag him-” 

“The man’s in pain!  Have you tried-” 

“Too risky, if he’s shrugging off the morphine like-” 

“You can’t be in here!  Get out-” 

“What do we have for non-opiates?” 

“There’s propoxy-” 

“What the _hell_ do you think you’re doing?!” 

Suddenly, the pain stopped.  Just ceased to exist, like it’d never been.  The muscles in his back ached and were knotted with tension, his right shoulder felt kind of like someone had jammed a red-hot poker in it in the not too distant past, and his throat felt like he’d been gargling with bleach; but that was it.  No more skin melting off his bones.  The lingering aches and pains felt almost pleasant, in comparison.  Eliot’s scream broke off into a choking sob of relief.  

Blurry people in long white lab coats were frozen in place around his bed, shocked immobile at the sudden cessation of Eliot’s cries and staring at him.  And then behind him.  They wavered into slightly better focus as Eliot blinked moisture into his scratchy eyes, but God, he was fucking exhausted.  Blinking was about all the effort he could bring himself to exert at the moment.  Debilitating agony was hard work, and while unfortunately he’d already known that from past experience, at least that meant he wasn’t going to be surprised by the overwhelming urge to sleep for a fucking week that was about to come crashing down on him.  He could feel it looming just around the corner. 

“An tended to ‘gift’ his hosts with nerve damage on taking them, so they would be less able to fight back if they got the chance, but he was lazy.  Easy to fix if you‘ve got the goods,” a woman’s accented voice half-laughed from just beyond Eliot’s peripheral vision.  Her accent sounded _almost_ Australian, except for not.  Eliot couldn’t quite place it, but, then again, he was too tired to really care.  “He always did take the really pretty ones, when he had the chance,” she added, and her laughing voice moved further away as she spoke until the sound of a closing door cut off her last word. 

“Think Vala heard him all the way from the gate-” He didn’t get a chance to hear the rest of whatever that particular lab coat was saying, because sleep reached out and dragged him down into blissful unconsciousness without giving him a say in the matter.

 

 

 _Later…_  

Shawn had been released from the infirmary roughly an hour after Eliot had woken up, hard on the heels of Colonel Caldwell’s hernia-inducing comment, and Eliot hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him since.  It’d taken two more days for Eliot to get cleared to leave the infirmary, and another three hours after that to read through and sign the thickest stack of papers he’d ever seen (Talk about non-disclosure agreements—by the time he’d signed, he wasn’t sure if he was even allowed to admit the United States existed.) before someone would tell him where Shawn was.  Needless to say, the revelation of being on a spaceship bigger than the _Enterprise_ palled beneath the irritation and building rage that they were keeping Shawn from him.  Or him from Shawn.  

After a fruitless hour of interrogating the personnel he came across while stalking through the ship, a baby-faced Major finally informed him that Shawn had been sent planetside—back to Santa Barbara—because he’d refused to sign the non-disclosure agreement.  The same Major told him that Colonel Sheppard had stepped in and made sure no one would railroad Shawn into signing by tossing him in the brig until he signed or died of old age, but that was as far as the Colonel had been able to help, seeing as how he was in hot water over the whole Moreau thing himself.  Eliot felt distantly grateful to John (as well as mildly surprised by the details someone, somewhere, had let slip to become gossip), but didn’t let it distract him from working his way up the chain of command.  He had to find someone to authorize getting him back on the planet—preferably to Santa Barbara—right the fuck now.  

A day of browbeating and snarling at people with progressively shinier shoulders finally got him planetside.  It was a step in the right direction, at least, even though he was currently sequestered in some General’s office in what had to be the most depressingly grey military complex known to man—at least what little he’d seen of it while being hustled from one bland, sterile, cinderblock and concrete room to another—and he’d seen some depressingly grey military complexes in his time.  

Eliot paced the room impatiently as he waited for the General to deign to make an appearance in his own office for a meeting that should have begun eleven minutes ago.  Finally, the doorknob rattled and Eliot spun to glare at the door, his legs planted and his arms crossed over his chest, and glowered at the face that peered cautiously through the half open door before it was flung open.  

“Finally,” the guy said with a groan of relief.  “I swear they move the damn thing around when I’m not looking.  Do you know how many doors I had to check to find my own office?  Fifteen.  And I really didn’t need to see what was going on behind door number fourteen, either.  There’s no way I’m old enough to see that yet.”  Eliot flicked a glance up to the man’s silver hair, but didn’t comment.  

The guy was wearing rumpled BDUs that wouldn’t pass even the most lenient inspection, but the stars on his collar meant he was probably the General Eliot had been waiting for.  That, or a guy who’d knocked the General on his head and stolen his uniform after tossing the unconscious officer in a closet.  Eliot revised the possibility of the latter upwards as the man tossed himself down into the chair behind the desk and kicked his feet up on a stack of papers centered in the middle of the desk.  

“Sit, sit,” the man waved a hand at Eliot and the crappy folding chair he was standing next to.  Eliot remained standing.  The man shrugged, “Suit yourself.”  He dropped his legs to the floor without scattering the stack of papers in a way that implied lots of practice.  He sat forward and rested his elbows on the desk, pinning Eliot with a level stare.  “So, Vala tells me you had System Lord An in your head—and believe me, with a name like Anne, I totally get why he went to the dark side—Colonel Sheppard will say only good things about you, Dr. McKay says you’re not too stupid to live—which, believe me, isn’t something most people get out of him—and the entire SGC is making grabby hands for you, while the Army is pretending you never existed out of one side of their mouth and badmouthing you from the other.  But that could just be sour grapes, because they don’t get to play with our cool toys.”  

Eliot eyed him silently while the General paused, but the General just stared back at him.  Eliot didn’t know if he was waiting for a response or just being a dick.  Either way, it was wasting time and impatient didn’t begin to describe how Eliot was feeling at the moment.  “And?” he conceded, angling the visitor’s chair (with the accompanying grating screech of metal against poured concrete that he didn’t attempt to prevent) so the back was no longer facing the door and sat.  The chair was just as uncomfortable as it’d looked.  

The general leaned back with a smirk and the staring contest continued for another few seconds before the General broke the silence, saying, “the Marines really want a Ranger to play with, but you’d have to promise not to break them.” And that just left Eliot wondering if he’d managed to miss a chunk of the conversation.  The one where the General explained what the fuck he was talking about, for instance. 

Silence descended briefly as he tried to figure out how to respond.  Or how any of this related to why he was meeting with the General in the first place.  “Sir.”  Eliot finally managed.  

“General O’Neill—two L’s,” the General held up three fingers, “or you can just call me Jack.” 

Eliot chose to ignore that.  “General O’Neill.  Sir.  What the hell are you talking about?” 

O’Neill blinked at him.  “Didn’t anyone tell you?  We’re reinstating you, and you’re going to work here at the SGC.  Probably on an off-world team—SG-12 needs someone to replace Williamson, at least until his leg grows back, and then after that you’ll probably be up for your own team.  Officially, you’d be the new Army liaison for Cheyenne Mountain.  If you want, that is.  Oh, and Boris wants to pick your brains some more on what Annie might have let slip out.” 

Until his _leg grows back_?  Eliot silently ran that sentence through his head again, but it didn’t make any more sense with repetition.  What the hell kind of place _was_ this?  But as much as he wanted to find out, it wasn’t the reason he was here for.  “Sir, I came to talk to you about releasing me.  I need to get back to Santa Barbara and find- I have something to take care of.”  He paused, but O’Neill’s expression didn’t change.  “As flattering as all this is, sir, I’m an ex-con.  You can’t hire me.  I need you to let me go,” Eliot was attempting to mask the desperation in his voice, and his request ended up coming out in a sardonic drawl that skirted the edge of outright offensive. 

O’Neill just grinned at him.  “Sure I can!  The President pardoned you himself.  Your record is now as clean and shiny as a brand new clean and shiny thing.” 

Eliot caught himself clenching his fists and leaning forward in his chair.  He forced himself to relax his hands and lean back in the chair, and to not lunge across the desk and strangle the General who just _wouldn’t listen_.  “Sir,” he managed through gritted teeth, “I have to go to Santa Barbara.  Now.” 

O’Neill leaned back in his chair and swung back and forth in little half circles, the office chair squeaking annoyingly in protest, and he studied Eliot thoughtfully.  “How about I give you some time to think it over,” he finally offered, if in a tone that didn’t really sound like a question.  

Eliot clamped down on the growl that wanted to rumble out of his chest.  He didn’t need to be stuck on this base until he made the choice they liked-  Fuck it.  He’d escape if he had to.  God knows he’d done it before, if under different circumstances.  It had been a different base, obviously, but this one couldn’t be that much- 

O’Neill interrupted his train of thought. “You were reinstated and reassigned retroactively, by the way, so you’ve got some back pay coming as soon as you tell HR where to put it, and you’re eligible for retirement if you decide that way.  If not, you’re probably due a promotion or two.”  O’Neill stood.  “You’ve got a week’s leave to make up your mind, soldier.  Talk to Harriman, he’s probably hovering outside the door, and he’ll get you to where you want to go for your vacation.  Dismissed.” 

Eliot found himself on his feet and snapping off a salute in response to O’Neill’s command tone before he knew what hit him.  Slightly bewildered, he turned to leave the office.  O’Neill’s voice stopped him right before he opened the door, but he stared at the doorframe rather than turning to face the General.  “Two things, Corporal Spencer.  Off the record.  If you could get him to sign, that’d be great, but no biggie if you can’t.  And, on an unrelated note, we’re really good here at the SGC at not _asking_.  About anything.  Ever.”  O’Neill coughed awkwardly, and Eliot, completely mortified, took the opportunity to flee the general’s office, the heat in his face a good clue that he was bright red with embarrassment.  

Inwardly, though, Eliot was numb.  Everything that’d just been dropped in his lap—it was just too much for him to process at the moment. 

He was still numb when he got dropped off in front of the Psych office with his new C-bag slung over his shoulder.  ( _Cpl. Spencer_ was stenciled on the side in dull black letters, and it had come pre-packed by God knows who with God knows what.  He still hadn’t looked inside.)  But then again, it’d only been twenty minutes since he’d met with O’Neill, so it wasn’t like he’d really had time to process much of anything.  Twenty minutes from Colorado Springs to Santa Barbara, and most of that had been spent being driven around Santa Barbara by a chatty Marine with no sense of direction.  If the SGC (and he still wasn’t really clear on what that stood for) ever felt like funding themselves independently, they could put the airlines out of business. 

Eliot stared at the door from where his boots were glued to the sidewalk.  He’d come this far, but somehow he couldn’t make his feet carry him the last few yards to knock on the door.  He caught a glimpse of movement through the picture window with the big PSYCH stenciled on it, and the door was flung open a moment later, making knocking irrelevant.  

Eliot drank Shawn in with his eyes.  It’d only been two and a half days since Shawn had been released from the infirmary and kicked back to Santa Barbara, only two and a half days since Eliot had last seen him, but it felt more like it’d been two weeks, or two months.  They stared at each other silently, Eliot shifting awkwardly from foot to foot on the sidewalk, Shawn still braced in the doorway, one hand holding the outflung door open and the other keeping a white-knuckled grip on the doorframe.  

A voice floating out from inside the office broke the silent tableau, “Shawn, who is it?  Is it a client?” and Eliot suddenly had an armful of Shawn.  He was all over the place, pressing quick kisses to Eliot’s face, running his hands over Eliot’s shoulders and the back of his neck, pulling back to stare at him briefly before lunging in to press a hard kiss against his mouth and running a cautious hand over Eliot’s right shoulder again.  Eliot dropped his C-bag without a thought and ignored the mildly ominous thunk it made when it hit the sidewalk, pulling Shawn close with an arm around his waist and the other slanted over his shoulders, holding Shawn still for the moment and tightly enough to provoke a muttered protest, but Eliot just nuzzled into the crook where Shawn’s neck met his shoulder and just breathed in the smell of sun and salt and sand and pineapple and _Shawn_.

 

**The Beginning**

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilery End Notes: In this ‘verse, Laura Cadman (Yes, Jesse is the spawn of Sheppard and Cadman!) was Marine Corps, not Air Force. Though according to canon, Cadman actually was a Marine first and then switched branches, apparently, so here I guess the switch just never happened. Also in this ‘verse, Markham and Stackhouse never died, because they are love, even if I only mention them, like, once. And no, I don’t know why Jack’s got an office at the SGC, but I think we can all assume it’s because he’s pretty much in charge of _everything_ and if he wants a closet to call his own at Cheyenne, no one’s going to nay-say him.


End file.
